grace murray and the bug

[jamie]

just read a lovely (offline) article about Grace Murray.

many of you might know who she is, i certainly did not...

born 1906, she was a mathematical prodigy and studied at vassar and yale, before joining the navy during world war 2.

she was promptly put in their computer research department to work on the 2nd ever digitally programmable computer, the Mark 1.

later, whilst working on the Mark II, an engineer reported a fault in the system. grace finally tracked it down to a moth which was stuck between two contacts ;-)

she stuck this moth in her computer book and referred to all subsequent computer errors as 'bugs'!

the article also mentions that it was her decision in 1959 to limit the display of the year to only 2 digits (because of bit costs), thereby causing the year 2000 problems.

what a lady and what a legacy! :-)

[JuniorHarris]

Yes, she was quite a pioneer in the industry...Grace Murray Hopper was also the mother of COBOL. For you youngsters, that's an old modular programming language used to process large batch operations!~ ;)

[georgeek]

I had the pleasure of meeting her a few times. On one occasion when she officially opened the original computer exhibits at the Science Museum in London she gave a speech. It must have been around the late 70s I think but I do remember her introducing her famous 1ft long piece of wire! It was the first time I had seen it. I remember her as being very modest though. But on another occasion she told me that she still got a lot of pleasure from remembering when she was voted 'Man of the Year' by the Data Processing Management Association in the late 60s.

As you say quite a lady - they don't make them like that anymore!

[Nick_W]

Quite a History [cs.yale.edu]!

Nick