Meet Grace Hopper, the Pioneering Computer Scientist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the Historic Mark I Computer (1906-1992):

On a page for its School of Technology, Rasmussen College lists six "Assumptions to Avoid" for women who want to enter the field of computer science. I couldn't comment on whether these "assumptions" (alleged misconceptions like "the work environment is hostile to women") are actually disproved by the commentary. But I might suggest a seventh "assumption to avoid"-that women haven't always been computer scientists, integral to the development of the computer, programming languages, and every other aspect of computing, even 100 years before computers existed.

In fact, one of the most notable women in computer science, Grace Hopper, served as a member of the Harvard team that built the first computer, the room-sized Mark I designed in 1944 by physics professor Howard Aiken. Hopper also helped develop COBOL, the first universal programming language for business, still widely in use today, a system based on written English rather than on symbols or numbers. And she is credited with coining the term "computer bug" (and by extension "debug"), when she and her associates found a moth stuck inside the Mark II in 1947. ("From then on," she told Time magazine in 1984, "when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.")

(Via Open Culture)

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My original entry is here: Meet Grace Hopper, the Pioneering Computer Scientist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the Historic Mark I Computer (1906-1992). It posted Tue, 07 Aug 2018 12:34:08 +0000.

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