Photo: James S. Davis, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Grace Brewster Murray was born in New York City in 1906. She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1934 and taught at Vassar.
In 1943 she joined the Navy Reserve. She was sent to Harvard to work on the Mark I, an early electromechanical computer, and became one of its first programmers.
Compilers and COBOL
After the war she joined the company building UNIVAC. She believed programs should be written in words people could read, not just symbols. Her team built the A-0 compiler in the early 1950s and later FLOW-MATIC, which used English-like commands.
FLOW-MATIC strongly influenced COBOL, a business programming language created in 1959. COBOL still runs many banking and government systems.
Hopper liked to tell the story of a moth found in a Harvard computer relay in 1947 and taped into the logbook as the “first actual case of bug being found.”
Back to the Navy
The Navy retired her and called her back several times. She retired for good in 1986 as a rear admiral, at 79. She died in 1992 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
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