MARCH
07, 2015 5:00 PM ET
3
min 58 sec
Secretary of the Navy John Lehman (right) promotes Grace Hopper to the
rank of commodore in a ceremony at the White House with President Ronald
Reagan.
Pete
Souza/Courtesy of ESPN Films
In
today's male-dominated computer programming industry, it's easy to forget that
a woman — Grace Hopper — helped usher in the computer revolution.
During
World War II, Hopper left a teaching job at Vassar College to join the Navy
Reserve. That's when she went to Harvard to work on the first programmable
computer in the United States: the Mark I.
Gillian
Jacobs is best known for her work as Britta on the TV show Community.
Frazer
Harrison/Getty Images
Gillian
Jacobs, best known for her role as Britta Perry in the comedy television show Community, has
directed a short documentary about Grace Hopper titled The Queen of
Code.
"These
people were making it up as they went along. The computers they were working on
were the size of rooms, they were breaking down constantly," Jacobs
says.
Women
were responsible for programming early computers, and Hopper led the charge.
Later in her career, Hopper helped create a common language that computers
could understand. It was called common business oriented language, or COBOL — a
programming language still used today.
Rear
Admiral Hopper went on to become the oldest serving officer in the United
States Navy. She died in 1992 at the age of 85.
You can
watch the documentary The Queen Of Code at fivethirtyeight.com.
Grace
Hopper joined the Navy during World War II and served on and off until 1986.
Courtesy
of ESPN Films
Interview
Highlights
On Grace
Hopper's iconic image
She was
always in full Naval dress. She wore cat-eye glasses. She's a very tiny woman.
She managed to ride the line between being forceful enough to get what she
wanted accomplished and she referred to herself as a pirate within the Navy.
She would go in the middle of the night and steal office supplies. Anything that
wasn't glued down she thought was fair game. And she said that she would just
march into her superior's office and demand things. But she was also incredibly
funny. She's a fascinating woman.
On
finding a literal bug in the Mark II computer
Apparently
one night, the computer stopped working. They went to look and actually found a
moth in a relay. ...
I don't
know if Grace Hopper herself coined that term, but it's often associated with
her that we now think of debugging.
On Grace
Hopper as the "queen of code"
Grace
Hopper was able to succeed in a number of male-dominated institutions: the
Navy, the computing industry. And yet she never considered herself a feminist.
I have a clip in my documentary where she's asked by an interviewer, "What
have you made of the women's [liberation] movement of the last 20 years?"
And she said: "I don't know much about it 'cause I didn't have to worry
about it. I was in the Navy."
There's
a celebration named after her; she's got a destroyer named after her. But she
herself kind of had disdain for that. It's sort of the two at play — her public
image as this sort of icon of computing, and then the woman herself who
probably would have taken a pin to that balloon.
At the
end credits of my piece, I have one of her biographers, Kathleen
Broome Williams, saying she thought Grace Hopper would hate the title Queen
of Code.
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