Grace Hopper, the pioneer of computing who also discovered the first bug - an insect that entered the computer and caused a short circuit

She is also known as a partner in the development of the Cobol language - in which the commands to the computer are given in words and not in numerical codes. Hopper was also quoted in several famous sayings, one of which is: It's easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission."

Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 - January 1, 1992). You will be remembered as the pioneer of computing, and co-inventor of the Cobol language - the business-oriented programming language. On the US Navy website, she is recognized as the first lady of software. She was also quoted in several famous sayings, one of which is: Easy It's better to ask for forgiveness than to receive permission."

As a child she was a diligent student. In 1928, at the age of 22, she graduated with first class honors from Vassar College. She then studied at Yale University, where she received a master's degree in mathematics and physics in 1930 and a PhD in mathematics in 1934. Hopper began teaching mathematics at VASSAR in 1931 at a modest salary of $800 per year but remained there until she joined the US Navy in 1943.

As part of her work in the Navy, at the height of World War II, she was assigned to the armaments computerization project at Harvard University where she became the first programmer of the Navy's Mark 1 computer, the mechanical marvel of its time. Hopper loved gadgets and indeed she took the opportunity to play with the biggest gadget of her time, this is a huge device measuring 17 meters long, 2.5 meters high and 2.5 meters wide, which contained switches, bulky relays and vacuum tubes - it was the Mark 1 computer It stored 72 words and performed three connection operations every second.

In 1946, Hopper was discharged from active duty and joined Harvard where she worked in the computer lab where she continued to work with Mark 2 and Mark 3 computers for the US Navy. In 1949 she joined the Eckert Mochelli computer company in Philadelphia, later called Sperry Rand, where she designed the first large-scale commercial electronic computer, the Univac, which was a thousand times more powerful than the Navy's Mark 1 computer.

According to her CV on the Navy website, she changed the lives of all those involved in the computer industry by developing the Bomarc system, later called COBOL, a business-oriented common language

Kobol made it possible for computers to respond to words rather than numbers. Jokingly, she explained, "I developed the Cobol language because I didn't know how to balance my checkbook." She is also remembered as the one who drowned the Mihal Bug when she found an error in the Mark 2 computer, and when she checked it turned out that a moth was trapped in one of the relays. The bug was carefully removed and pasted into Hopper's daily log, since every computer problem is called a bug.

Hopper retired from the Navy in 1966 and was returned to active duty in 1967 for six months. She was promoted to the rank of captain in 1973 and appointed special advisor to the Naval Automation and Data Processing Command (NAVDAC), where she remained until she retired in 1986 - at the age of eighty, an age at which naval soldiers are forced to retire even if they had not done so voluntarily by then.

For a biography of Grace Hopper on the US Navy website