Mother of Compilers

The article and the video are about the Rear Admiral Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, who is known as the “mother of COBOL”, and some of the most important events of her life and their contributions to the IT field. Even when the history of computer hardware is as the article says mostly male-oriented, the contribution of Mrs. Grace to this field can be comparable to the contributions of other IT revolutionaries. I didn’t know who Mrs. Grace was, it is true that I did not know how much she contributed compared to the contributions of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Alan Turing. Also, I did not know that the first programmer was Ada Lovelace.

It is interesting that she disassembled clocks in order to know how it works, also funny to know that she ended up disassembling another six clocks, it reminds me when we “disassemble” code to know how it works. It is also impressive that she studied math, physic and engineering at the Vassar College at New York and earned a master and a doctorate in math and mathematical physics. The surprises continue, I know the story about how the term “bug” was invented, but I did not know that was her and her team whom invented it.

Finally, other of the import events of her life was their inventions, the construction of the Mark I, an electro-mechanical computer, the competition of the UNIVAC and the programming of the BINAC, which was a binary machine build for the Snark Missile project. The write of the A-0 compiler and finally the develop of COBOL. She has earned multiple awards, I feel bad, because I really did not know anything about her and her contributions, even when are important part of the main story of the software. I hope to read more articles about her, and maybe about the develop of the A and B compilers