Nicky Penttila

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! As per findingada.com: “Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.”

One of the women who inspired me to continue my interest in science, even as I changed my major from engineering to communications, was Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a longtime U.S. Naval officer, mathematician and early computer programmer who developed the first compiler for a computer programming language (COBOL).

I first learned of her through a segment on 60 Minutes in 1983, when she was Captain Hopper and still working and lecturing in her dress uniform, though she was in her 70s. She “helped teach computers a language,” as Morley Safer puts it in the video, and allowed all us non-mathematicians to be programmers, too.

At that time, I thought all scientists were men in white labcoats; all computer scientists men in white labcoats with pocket protectors. One of my girlfriends was majoring in computer programming and finding it lonely and rough for a woman; my school had a special program trying to get more women to take the program. I thought my friend was breaking new ground. And then I saw Capt. Hopper, who had worked for decades and decades already, who had built a foundational part of our PC, who had popularized the term “bug” (after an actual moth that got caught in a relay in one of the old, giant Mark II computers). She was a scientist, an engineer—and a word-maven!

Thanks to YouTube, I watched the segment again last week for the first time since I first saw it, and was inspired again. This time, I was struck by how forward-looking she is, and how easily she can put things into perspective. In the second clip here, Safer asks her about the people who are afraid of computers, thinking they might take over the world or something. Hopper recalls people who were scared to death of telephones, of electric lights (compared to gaslight): “We’ve always gone through this, with every change.” And while I disagree with her on the ability of women to perform combat roles, it was nice to hear her say, “Women have always done mathematics, since the days of the Greeks.” When Safer asks, “Do you think that women are better than men at mathematics?” she quickly responds, “No. just the same.”

And as my friends know, I aim to live one of her favorite adages: “When in doubt, don’t ask. Just do. It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.” I can only imagine how much grief she put up with–Naval regulations, bureaucracy, sexism, ageism, whatever-ism–but she persisted and prevailed.

Grace Hopper was born Dec. 9, 1906, and died on Jan. 1, 1992, still working, still looking forward.