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"It is easier to apologize than to get permission." -- Admiral Grace Hopper
"A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things." -- Admiral Grace Hopper
Admiral Grace Hopper was a distinguished naval officer and computer scientist. After receiving a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale, she taught math at Vassar College, her alma mater, where she later became an associate professor. The first person to receive the computer sciences Man of the Year award from the Data Processing Management Association (1969), Hopper was a programmer on the world's first large-scale digital computer, Mark I. "It was 51 feet long, eight feet high, eight feet deep," she said. "And it had 72 words of storage and could perform three additions a second."
Her work resulted in the first computer language compiler, and she worked on the development of COBOL, one of the first computer languages. She is the person who first coined the term "bug" when referring to a programming error, which in her case was an actual moth in the computer.
In 1983, she became the first woman to attain the rank of Rear Admiral. In September 1991, President George Bush awarded her the National Medal of Technology "for her pioneering accomplishments in the development of computer technology and opened the door to a significantly larger universe of users."
After her retirement from the armed services, she worked as a consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation until her death.
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