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In fact, it was the calm Bloch rather than the spunky Hopper who had the more contentious relationship with Commander Aiken. “Dick was always getting in trouble,” Hopper claimed. “I would try to explain to him that Aiken was just like a computer. He’s wired a certain way, and if you are going to work with him you must realize how he is wired.”15 Aiken, who initially balked at having a woman on his officer corps, soon made Hopper not only his primary programmer but his top deputy. Years later he would recall fondly the contributions she made to the birth of computer programming. “Grace was a good man,” he declared.16
Among the programming practices that Hopper perfected at Harvard was the subroutine, those chunks of code for specific tasks that are stored once but can be called upon when needed at different points in the main program. “A subroutine is a clearly defined, easily symbolized, often repeated program,” she wrote. “Harvard’s Mark I contained subroutines for sine x, log10 x, and 10x, each called for by a single operational code.”17 It was a concept that Ada Lovelace had originally described in her “Notes” on the Analytical Engine. Hopper collected a growing library of these subroutines. She also developed, while programming the Mark I, the concept of a compiler, which would eventually facilitate writing the same program for multiple machines by creating a process for translating source code into the machine language used by different computer processors.
In addition, her crew helped to popularize the terms bug and debugging. The Mark II version of the Harvard computer was in a building without window screens. One night the machine conked out, and the crew began looking for the problem. They found a moth with a wingspan of four inches that had gotten smashed in one of the electromechanical relays. It was retrieved and pasted into the log book with Scotch tape. “Panel F (moth) in relay,” the entry noted. “First actual case of bug being found.”18 From then on, they referred to ferreting out glitches as “debugging the machine.”
By 1945, thanks largely to Hopper, the Harvard Mark I was the world’s most easily programmable big computer. It could switch tasks simply by getting new instructions via punched paper tape rather than requiring a reconfiguration of its hardware or cables. However, this distinction was largely u
Computer i
When he went to Pe
But unlike Aiken, Hopper was open-minded enough that she soon changed her outlook. Advances were being made that year in ways to reprogram ENIAC more quickly. And the people in the forefront of that programming revolution, to Hopper’s delight, were women.
THE WOMEN OF ENIAC
All the engineers who built ENIAC’s hardware were men. Less heralded by history was a group of women, six in particular, who turned out to be almost as important in the development of modern computing. As ENIAC was being constructed at Pe
This entailed switching around by hand ENIAC’s rat’s nest of cables and resetting its switches. At first the programming seemed to be a routine, perhaps even menial task, which may have been why it was relegated to women, who back then were not encouraged to become engineers. But what the women of ENIAC soon showed, and the men later came to understand, was that the programming of a computer could be just as significant as the design of its hardware.
The tale of Jean Je
When she finished in January 1945, her calculus teacher showed her a flyer soliciting women mathematicians to work at the University of Pe
Wanted: Women With Degrees in Mathematics. . . . Women are being offered scientific and engineering jobs where formerly men were preferred. Now is the time to consider your job in science and engineering. . . . You will find that the slogan there as elsewhere is “WOMEN WANTED!”23
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