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During World War II, Grace Hopper enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Harvard to work on the first large-scale digital computer. She later wrote the first COBOL compiler and is often referred to as "the mother of COBOL."
Hopper traveled to computer conferences and colleges giving lectures about the data processing insights and computer concerns she acquired during her years in the profession. She wrote more than fifty papers and articles on software and programming languages and coauthored a college computer literacy textbook.
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One of the stories Hopper tells in a videotape recording of a lecture at the University of Maryland in February 1983 is a classic that has been told and retold. The story has to do with the origin of the words bug and debug. The word bug, as a fluke or problem, has been around a long time, but Dr. Hopper tells the story of the "first actual bug found" in her book Understanding Computers (West, 1984).
In the summer of 1945, scientists were working on the Mark II, one of the earliest computers. The Mark II had stopped for no apparent reason, and the programmers were trying to figure out what was wrong. They finally discovered that a moth was caught in one of the relays, causing the malfunction. They removed the bug and the computer worked fine. Since then, computer scientists have used the term debugging to refer to removing any type of error or malfunction from either a computer's hardware or software. (The original "bug" is taped to a page in a logbook on display at the Naval Weapons Museum in Dahlgren, Virginia.)
Dr. Hopper received 27 honorary doctorates, as well as awards from learned societies in both Europe and the United States. In fact, the Data Processing Management Association selected her as its first computer sciences "Man of the Year"!
Amazing Grace died in her sleep January 1, 1992.