CHAPTER ONE THERE’S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY The summer of 1949 found Grace Hopper frustrated She had a PhD in mathematics from Yale University Yet she could not get her checkbook to balance After several months of struggling she asked her brother Roger for help Roger pored over the columns of her checkbook register checking and rechecking Roger realized that sometimes Hopper subtracted correctly but other times she did not Finally he realized the problem His sister had been mixing up normal numbers with octal a mathematical system based on eight digits instead of the standard base of ten Roger’s findings got Hopper thinking Since June 1949 she had been working for the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation or EMCC as a senior mathematician The start-up Grace Hopper a leader in the computer programming field helped change the way computers receive data and provide feedback 5
computer company had asked Hopper to write coding instructions to run programs on its Binary Automatic Computer BINAC which was being developed for Northrop Aircraft Corporation’s secret Snark Missile project BINAC was able to perform high-speed arithmetic and was the world’s first computer that contained stored programs It contained approximately 700 vacuum tubes and was too large to easily move once it was set up Each workday the 42-year-old Hopper lived in a world of octal converting base-ten numbers into The First Computer English mathematician Charles Babbage is credited with being among the first people to talk about building a calculating machine In the early 1820s Babbage was frustrated with the unreliability of printed tables used for calculations Such tables commonly were used for everything from navigation to banking to construction Yet the tables were not perfect They contained errors caused by miscopying or miscalculations Babbage dreamed of a way to automate creation of these tables which would remove such errors He believed machines unlike humans would not make mistakes in their calculations In 1822 he drew up designs for a difference engine that would add numbers However because he lacked funding and a skilled machinist who could craft it to his specifications he was not able to build it Babbage had assistance in his work from young mentee Ada Lovelace In writing about Babbage’s designs Lovelace described how codes could be created so the machine could handle letters and symbols as well as numbers She also came up with the theory of looping which is when a computer repeats a series of instructions For these and other contributions Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer 6
their base-eight equivalents so she could enter them into the computer At that time octal was considered to be the most efficient way to accomplish the task Yet outside of the office Hopper needed to use the conventional base-ten system Hopper realized she had two choices Either she could become better at the language the computer was using or the computer could become better at the language she was using She decided it would be more efficient to teach the computer how to process language that was more familiar to people Hopper would soon shift focus to work on another computer using a different programming language But the core desire to make computers communicate with people more easily stuck with her PROGRAMMING THE UNIVAC In mid-1949 Hopper moved from working on the BINAC to a different project at EMCC called UNIVAC for Universal Automatic Computer In the eyes of EMCC founders and former professors John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert UNIVAC was going to revolutionize computers They envisioned a high-speed electronic digital computer with an ability to work with problems that involved both numbers and words Early computers could only work with numbers which limited their abilities If they could be redesigned to compute words as well computers would become an exciting new tool for businesses 7
