Google Doodle Remembers Computing Pioneer Grace Hopper 157
A reader writes "Monday's Google Doodle honors computing genius Grace Hopper (remembered as a great pioneer in computing, as well as in women's achievements in science and engineering), on what would have been her 107th birthday, doodling her right where she spent much of her time – at the helm of one of the world's first computers."
Some fun Grace Hopper info (Score:4, Informative)
"If it's good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission." --Grace Hopper
* credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches
* Navy destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) is named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC.
* at the age of seven she decided to determine how an alarm clock worked, and dismantled seven...
* bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics
* wrote her own compiler in 1952.. "Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."
More here of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper [wikipedia.org]
Re:Grace Hopper Park (Score:5, Informative)
Her Commodore/Admiral rank was only honorary.
No, it was not merely honorary. [navy.mil] However, 40 of her degrees were (see same link).
She was a computer prophet (Score:5, Informative)
Chips Ahoy: Do you think the current popularity of micros is just a fad?
Hopper: No, the big mainframes are going to disappear. In fact, I intend to scuttle them. They have to go. They’ll be too slow. We’ll build systems of computers. It will be a whole bunch of micros, and they’ll all call each other up and talk. If you use a big mainframe, first you have to do inventory and then you do payroll and so on. You might just as well have a micro doing each of those jobs all working in parallel. That’s the way you get the speed. The big pressure is going to be on faster answers. There never was a good reason for putting inventory and payroll on the same machine. The only reason you did it was because you could only afford to own one computer. That’s no longer true. The micros are as big [in terms of processing capacity] as mainframes were only 10 or 12 years ago. Back then a big mainframe had 64K. That’s smaller than today’s micros by a long shot.
Chips Ahoy: Is there a limit of what micros can do for us?
Hopper: They’ll only be limited if our imaginations are limited. It’s all up to us. Remember, there were people who said the airplane couldn’t fly.
http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/hopper_grace.htm#limits [navy.mil]