Today is the 107th birthday of one of the most important people in computing history. Grace Hopper, the Navy Rear Admiral, mathematician and computer scientist was the first ever to write a compiler (the process that converts your programs into machine language, or ones and zeros), one of the first to see computers as something other than gigantic calculators, and even coined the term ‘debugging’ for removing problems within a machine. Of course, it was literally debugging in her case, since a moth had flown into relay 70 of the massive – and I mean massive; that’s a picture of it below and all it did were calculations since it used mechanical relays as opposed to circuits – Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator at Harvard University causing the system to experience operational problems. I have also included a picture of the bug itself, which is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History. She admits she didn’t actually find it, but her name is most often associated with it.

The above is just a small sample of her accomplishments, she really was a pioneer in the then-emerging world of computing capabilities. (One other thing that deserves mention – the site gracehopper.org, ostensibly for celebrating women in computing, never actually mentions or discusses Grace Hopper!)

The bug