FLOW-MATIC was the first programming language resembling the English language

The first compiler to facilitate communication with computers was developed by Grace Hopper

The A-0 program linker automatically translated mathematical symbols into machine-readable binary code. Although it took two years for computer executives to get on board with the idea, the technology was foundational to future programming languages that allowed computers to understand commands written in word-based languages.

COBOL was partly derived from Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC programming language

The Common Business-Oriented Language was developed for business data processing, supporting precise decimal calculations and an English-like syntax. Able to work across operating systems and hardware environments, COBOL and its newer versions support 80% of in-person credit card transactions and 95% of all ATM transactions.

Grace Hopper was inspired to join the armed forces after the attack on Pearl Harbor

Despite being too old to enlist and weighing below the required minimum to serve, Hopper was granted an exemption and assigned to work on the first electromechanical computer produced in the US. She and her team spent three months using the device to solve equations needed to design the implosion mechanism for the atomic bomb.

Grace Hopper won the Data Processing Management Association's 'Man of the Year' award

The inaugural recipient of the award—symbolic of the male-dominated nature of computer science—was honored in 1969 for her contributions to the development of COBOL and the first compiler. Hopper would also become the first woman from any country and the first American to be recognized as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

Grace Hopper warned against prioritizing hardware purchases in future computing

Foreseeing the rising volume of data and the increasing demand for its processing and access, she advocated that organizations first map the total flow of information they require and then choose infrastructure to support it, rather than wastefully spending on the fastest computing technology and forcing software to compensate for unnecessary hardware or incorrect data.

The story of two female programmers running the simulations behind chaos theory's discovery

Margaret Hamilton and Ellen Fetter worked on MIT's 800-pound Royal McBee LGP-30 computer, which was fed binary code on paper tape to perform computations. Among the computations performed were those involving equations describing the motion of gas in a circulating fluid for Edward Lorenz, widely considered the father of chaos theory.

Before transistors, which regulate the flow of electricity, vacuum tubes—glass tubes containing no gas that resemble light bulbs—served as the electronic switches in computers.

For her contributions, Grace Hopper received more than 40 honorary degrees

Beyond the scholarships, professorships, and awards named in her honor, President George Bush awarded Hopper the National Medal of Technology in 1991 for her work in developing computer programming languages that enhanced accessibility. In 1996, Hopper became only the second woman to have a US Navy warship named after her.

At the age of seven, Grace Hopper dismantled alarm clocks

Foreshadowing a career in computers, Hopper exhibited a curiosity for gadgets at a young age and took apart seven clocks, determined to understand how they worked. Despite having a dollhouse, Hopper built an elevator for it and showed a greater interest in building toy furniture than playing with dolls.

Grace Hopper described serving in the US Navy as the highest award she received

Despite retiring from the US Naval Reserve in 1966 at 60, as stipulated by Navy regulations, Hopper was repeatedly recalled for her pioneering expertise in computer science. By 1983, three years before her final retirement, she would give lectures about 200 days a year to computer scientists at military bases, college campuses, and businesses on behalf of the Navy.

Grace Hopper was named the 1959 Time magazine 'Woman of the Year'

The honor was part of the 2019 series "100 Women of the Year," which spotlighted an influential woman for each of the years the publication had previously awarded a "Man of the Year." In its write-up, Hopper was described as having "paved the way for women everywhere to thrive in math, computer science, and service to their countries."

President Barack Obama compared Grace Hopper to the Wright Brothers

When posthumously awarding Hopper with the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation's highest civilian honor—on Nov. 22, 2016, the former president remarked, "If Wright is flight, and Edison is light, then Hopper is code. [...] From cell phones to [US] Cyber Command, we can thank Grace Hopper for opening programming to millions more people."

The foundation for computer viruses was published after its creator's death

In the late 1940s, Hungarian American mathematician, scientist, and engineer John von Neumann gave a series of lectures where he explained the theoretical framework for a computer program that could replicate itself—the von Neumann Universal Constructor. His lectures were later compiled and published in 1966, nine years after his death from cancer.

Designed in 1937 by Harvard graduate student Howard H. Aiken, the 'Harvard Calculator' was used by the US Navy to solve advanced physics problems.

The terms 'bug' and 'debugging' were popularized by Grace Hopper's team

Engineers working on the Mark II computer at Harvard University identified a moth in one of its components in 1947, which caused it to malfunction. Describing the incident as the "first actual case of bug being found," the term first used by Thomas Edison in 1878 to describe faults in an apparatus caught on.

Microsoft's initial successes came from promising products that did not yet exist

In discussions with teams responsible for MITS's Altair 8800 and IBM's PC, Bill Gates and Paul Allen claimed to have created ready-to-use software. Code for the former was not completed until Paul Allen's flight to MITS' headquarters, where the software was successfully tested for the first time.

VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet, released with Apple II's personal computer in 1979

Before 1979, managers were essentially information processors working off paper ledgers. Scenario modeling was slow, manual, and expensive. Companies were understood as organizations that built things with financial analysis as secondary. VisiCalc made calculation so cheap that you could work iteratively, setting out forecasts and tweaking assumptions until you got the answer you wanted. Oks argues It created a new way of seeing the world.

Grace Hopper graduated first in her class of 800 officer candidates

As a volunteer in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service program, Hopper was able to fulfill roles beyond the nursing and clerical responsibilities normally available to women in the military. However, once World War II concluded and the emergency status was lifted, the Navy declined her request for a regular commission.

The world's first chatbot, ELIZA, was developed in the 1960s as a technical demonstration exploring human-computer communication, with one of its scripts allowing it to emulate a psychotherapist.

NVIDIA named several computer chip architectures after Grace Hopper

Unveiled in 2023, the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, designed for generative AI applications in data center-scale systems, combines a Grace CPU with a Hopper GPU to create a coherent memory model. This allows the Hopper to access Grace data directly, reducing the need to repeatedly copy data back and forth and vastly improving performance.

In 2017, Yale renamed one of its colleges to honor Grace Hopper

Founded in 1933, the Calhoun College—one of Yale's 12 undergraduate residential colleges—was renamed to Grace Hopper College in honor of the woman who earned a master's degree and PhD in mathematics from the university in the 1930s. The change was also made to distance the school from white supremacist John C. Calhoun.

The work of Claude Shannon, for whom Anthropic's AI chatbot is named

Known as the father of information theory, Claude Shannon applied Boolean algebra—a subset of mathematics that quantifies true or false statements as 1 or 0, respectively—to circuit design to develop the concept of a binary digit. His paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1948) laid the groundwork for all modern digital systems.

The Macintosh popularized GUI and mouse navigation for personal computing

A graphical user interface that utilized windows, icons, and pull-down menus, rather than text-based commands, contributed to the device's success after its January 1984 launch. Its original sound system—capable of playing four voices—was developed after non-technical staff suggested the machine should play music.

Later in life, the clock in Grace Hopper's office ran counterclockwise

Acknowledging that most people have "an enormous tendency to resist change," Hopper's clock served as a reminder for the computer scientist that just because things have been done a certain way does not mean they should forever remain that way: "They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that." (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Watch Grace Hopper's appearance on the 'Late Show with David Letterman'

During this comedic interview, Hopper describes her 43.5 years in the Navy, an anecdote about when President Reagan promoted her, and provides a visual aid to explain the transmission of information at the nanosecond scale via electricity.

The Grace Hopper Celebration honors women in computing every year

Since 1994, the world's largest gathering of women technologists has been produced by The Anita Borg Institute, a nonprofit driving intersectional equity in the global technical workforce. The event honors the legacy of Grace Hopper by highlighting the research and impact of women in technology.

CUDA, the computing platform that transformed graphics processing units from pixel renderers into general-purpose components powering AI, originated from a computer science student.

The first computer virus was created by a USC doctoral candidate in 1983

A year after creating malware in a controlled experiment that multiplied until it took over all of a computer's memory, Fred Cohen went public with his research and its risks. He called the self-replicating software a "computer virus," a term Cohen's advisor, Leonard Adleman, coined to describe its infectious behavior. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Computer pioneer Alan Turing was also an elite runner

Alan Turing is credited with helping to found modern computer science, in addition to cracking the Nazi code known as Enigma. Beyond these world-historical achievements, the British mathematician also nearly represented his country in the Olympics in the marathon, running just 11 minutes slower than the eventual gold recipient at the 1948 games. Read more on this lesser-known aspect of the man here.

NASA purchased about 60% of all integrated circuits from 1961 to 1965

The US government adopted the new technology to support the development of the Apollo Guidance Computer, which would help astronauts fly to the moon. This drove manufacturing up and costs down, setting the stage for the modern computing era.

Explore an online gallery highlighting the importance of graphical user interfaces

Before the Macintosh, computers were primarily used in offices and required users to type complex commands to perform tasks. Apple followed the device with the LaserWriter printer, bringing graphic production to at-home artists and designers.

Transformer architecture was the breakthrough that made AI chatbots possible

It changed how text was translated from a sequential, "one word at a time" method to one where every word in a text is processed in parallel. Advances in positional encoding and self-attention also helped models recognize context and word order better.

The history and operation of SIGABA, the US counterpart of the Nazi Enigma machine

Developed by the US Army and US Navy, over 10,000 of these machines were deployed by the end of World War II to encrypt messages for the armed forces using three series of rotors. The device would continue to be used until the 1950s, while personal computers were shown to possess enough computing power to crack it by 2021.

One of the first mechanical calculators—the Pascaline—was built in the 1640s by French mathematician Blaise Pascal to help his father, who worked as a tax collector.

Jacqueline Jenkins-Nye—Bill Nye's mother—worked as a code-breaker in World War II

While in the Navy, she was recruited to work on Enigma to help decode messages from the German military. Historians estimate that the efforts of code-breakers may have collectively shortened the war by as much as two years.

Computational and biological systems share fundamental principles, like randomness

Proposed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann, the concept originates from how DNA and computers run by executing encoded instructions in parallel. The advent of AI and the temperature parameter has seen neural networks mimic the randomness of protein encoding.

An explanation of Turing machines—the foundations of digital algorithms and computers

The device reads data, overwrites or ignores it, and then moves on to the next piece of data based on a set of programmed rules. By imagining this data as zeros and ones—binary that makes up computer code—Turing machines became the theoretical models for how any algorithm could be run on a computer if the procedure could be coded into a set of digital rules.

Python is an interpreted programming language that is growing in popularity

Python is used for web and software development, task automation, machine learning, data science, and financial analysis due to its simplicity, readability, and versatility across various applications. It was named after the BBC TV show "Monty Python's Flying Circus."

The first algorithmic random number generator was developed in 1946

Although previous methods of randomness involved physical tools with limited outcomes, such as dice, or relied on chaotic variables for number generation, such as electronic noise, John Von Neumann's middle-square method turned the problem into a mathematical computation. It has since been replaced by methods that generate numbers from unique initial values, such as the time on a clock.

Indigenous women crafted the integrated circuits for the Apollo Guidance Computer

Applying their blanket-weaving skills, over 1,000 Navajo women in New Mexico were hired to connect circuit components in intricate patterns using a microscope. Outside Boston, "rope mothers" at the Raytheon facility wove the AGC's core memory using threaded metal wires.

The term 'artificial intelligence' was coined in 1956

Dartmouth professor John McCarthy introduced the term during a summer workshop aimed at exploring how to make machines perform human-like tasks. Two years later, Perceptron Mark I became one of the first neural network machines.

Comparing ChatGPT with Claude, the latter excels in writing and coding projects

As of December 2025, Claude Code—Anthropic's AI-powered coding assistant—accounts for 54% of the enterprise coding market, and, while subjective, some report that Claude provides more natural-sounding writing. However, ChatGPT can create images and videos, not just generate text, and provides a broader set of applications via custom GPTs.

Understanding how Claude Code and other AI coding agents function

Under human oversight, a supervising large language model interprets user tasks and delegates work to subordinate LLMs, which can generate code, fix bugs, and run tests, often most effectively for proofs of concept. Incremental backups and versioning are crucial when using such agents, which can lose details during their work as a result of compressing context history to work around memory limitations.

Explore a collection of media depicting major milestones from the life of Grace Hopper

The gallery features Hopper's meeting with President Ronald Reagan, her attendance at the groundbreaking of the Grace Murray Hopper Service Center—a Naval data processing facility—and her Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony.

A timeline of computer history

The earliest computers bear little resemblance to the computing devices that most people rely on today. This timeline graphic from the Computer History Museum tracks their evolution, from the early days of bulky mainframes that only experts generally used through to the personal computing revolution and on to the modern mobile era. Readers will learn important context ahead of the next major computing platform shift.

Microsoft's Flight Simulator is one of history's longest-running software products

The program originated from a master’s thesis project on generating three-dimensional graphics, which was later combined with flight equations. The first version ran on the Apple II in early 1980, but its creator licensed the program to Microsoft two years later,

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

The history of graphics processing units began with hardware for displaying visuals in arcade machines, but the transition to 3D graphics led to the microchips and software that power today's AI data centers.

All computers are defined by their ability to input, store, process, and output data

From wooden machines to wearable tech, computers have changed a lot in appearance, but they all still perform the same essential tasks. Early computers were made of wood and metal—some were so big that they filled entire rooms just to solve simple math problems.