Amazing Grace Hopper
 |
She was born December 9, 1906 at New York City, New York. The passed in her sleep of natural causes on January 1, 1992 at age 85 in Arlington County, Virginia.
Anyway, I knew of "Amazing Grace" Hopper and she was a legend in her own time. I was never to attain that lofty status in my career.
She was instrumental in the creation of COBOL and developed the first compiler.
Admiral Hopper worked on the Harvard Mark I computer which was electromechanical and largely received input from 60 sets of 24 switches for manual data entry.
It could store 72 numbers, each 23 decimal digits long perform 3 additions or subtractions in a second. A multiplication took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over one minute.
She is also known for discovering the first "bug" in a computer program which was an actual insect, mind you.