The Queen of Code
ne day this October, more than 30,000 people entered Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Center or joined virtually for a massive technology conference. At the opening celebration, attendees danced in their seats, the aisles, and on stage as Mix Master Mike, surrounded by giant screens, played the Beastie Boys and countless other tracks. The dance party lasted nearly an hour, and everywhere people looked, they saw the name of Grace Murray Hopper, Class of 1928.
The event, which 11 Vassar students attended, was AnitaB.org’s Grace Hopper Celebration for women and nonbinary people in tech. Hopper, who arrived at Vassar as a student 100 years ago, is one of the most important people in the history of early computing. Often referred to as the “Queen of Code,” Hopper created the first-ever computer compiler, which translated mathematical code to machine-readable code, and wrote the manual for the first fully functional computer. “It is impossible to overstate Grace Hopper’s contributions to the field,” says Vassar Professor and Chair of Computer Science Marc Smith.
“She’s the founding mother of modern computing,” says Alison Lindland ’00, Chief Marketing Officer at Movable Ink, a company that uses AI for customer engagement, and founder of Vassar in Tech, an alum group with more than 1,000 members. “It’s just impossible to not know who Grace Hopper is.”
Hopper, who went on to become a U.S. Navy rear admiral, was a public figure before her 1992 death at age 85—she once appeared on David Letterman’s talk show, where she joked about being even older than Ronald Reagan when the president promoted her to her Navy rank. Hopper retired from the Navy Reserve in 1966. She later returned before retiring again in 1986. At that point, she was the oldest commissioned officer in the branch.
Hopper’s legacy has expanded even further as of late, and she has become a hero to those in tech. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yale announced the renaming of a residential college for her in 2017. In 2020, the U.S. Naval Academy opened Hopper Hall, an academic building, and Google announced the Grace Hopper subsea cable, linking the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. In 2022, Nvidia, one of the world’s most valuable companies, introduced the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, meant to handle giant-scale artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
Meanwhile, the Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy, a 12- or 28-week coding bootcamp for women and nonbinary people that launched in 2016, counts many Vassar alums among its more than 10,000 graduates. And the annual Grace Hopper Celebration has exploded in popularity since it began in 1994. Hamida Rahimi ’26, who attended for the first time this year, said she often feels like the only woman in the room, but at the event she felt welcome. It was “lovely to see how women help another woman,” she said. “There’s no one to judge you, there’s no one to talk bad about you. There’s no pressure.”
At Vassar, Hopper studied mathematics and physics. (Her sister, Mary Murray Westcote ’30, was also an alum.) Even as a student, Hopper had a gift for teaching others. “I shall ever be grateful to Grace for her taking time to tutor me in physics when I failed the midterm,” a former classmate wrote in a 1996 letter to VQ. “With her help, I suddenly began to understand the approach to science.”
Kurt Beyer, author of Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, says Vassar is an important part of her biography. “Because her mind had multidisciplinary tools that she developed while at Vassar, her vision, then, for computing also followed that multidisciplinary mindset,” says Beyer, whose biography was optioned in 2018 with an eye toward bringing it to the silver screen.
From Vassar, Hopper joined the Navy Reserve and served in the WAVES, which put women in certain roles during World War II so men could serve on ships. The Navy sent Hopper to Harvard to work on the Mark I, an early computer that was 51 feet long, 8 feet high, and used holes punched in paper tape. Hopper wrote the machine’s manual, the first of its kind. A 1944 edition of the Plainfield Courier-News described Hopper as working on “the Navy’s formidable new electric calculating machine, a 35-ton instrument reported capable of reaching the solution to almost any known problem in applied mathematics.” The Miscellany News reported on a lecture Hopper gave at Vassar two years later, in which she said the machine calculated what otherwise would have taken more than 300 years.
Staying in the Navy Reserve after the war, Hopper went to work at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which was building the UNIVAC, the first commercially available electronic computer. At the company, which later became part of Sperry Rand Corporation, she developed the A-0 System, a compiler that translated mathematical code into one that machines could read. Later, she helped lead the development of COBOL, Common Business-Oriented Language, one of the first high-level programming languages. It is still used today, especially in business, finance, and administrative systems. The language is even getting renewed attention as banks move old code onto the cloud. IBM estimated in April 2024 that more than 40 percent of online banking systems, 80 percent of in-person credit card transactions, and 95 percent of ATM transactions still used the language.
Lindland sees COBOL’s use of English-like language instead of mathematical code—“MOVE x TO y,” for example—as an approach that makes sense for someone with a liberal arts background. “It really comes from that humanistic approach, saying that the computer has to come to the human, not the human coming to the computer with the ones and zeros,” Lindland says. “That’s a very Vassar perspective.”
Hopper is credited with some of the language around computing that further humanized people’s relationship to tech. She popularized the concept of a computer “bug” (she taped a moth that had been causing malfunctions in the Mark II into a logbook, noting, “First actual case of bug being found”).
Beyer, the Hopper biographer, credits her not only with developing computing innovations, but also promoting them. “You have to invent it, you have to build it, and then you have to get people to use it,” he says. Hopper did all three of those things.
Decades after leaving Vassar, Hopper returned to speak many times and also helped convince Professor Winifred Asprey ’38, who had been one of her students, to bring Vassar into the computer age. Asprey reported that when she telephoned Hopper to ask, “Should Vassar get into the computing business?” Hopper responded, “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”
When Vassar’s first computer arrived on campus in 1967, Hopper came to speak, wearing her Navy ribbons. According to the Misc, she told the crowd that they were at the beginning of the computer age and only just starting to know what to do with computers.
Hopper is “in the DNA of our department,” says Smith, Computer Science Chair, who adds that students from intro-level to seniors are learning about Hopper. “It’s a source of pride in the department, and we talk about Grace Hopper all the time,” he says. These days, there is a display about her in Sanders Laboratory of Physics and a separate banner there featuring her image and her oft-cited quote about how the most dangerous phrase is, “We’ve always done it that way.”
While Hopper presided at the beginning of the computer age, we seem to be at a similar dawning when it comes to artificial intelligence. Since the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022, generative AI has become more accessible to everyday users, even as some people urge boundaries. Just as Hopper guided the public through the beginning of the computer age, new leaders could show the way through the AI one.
Reena Mehta ’01, Senior Vice President of Streaming and Digital Content at ABC News, says Hopper could serve as a model for people who work in the tech industry who “are looking for leadership that combines innovation and drive and incredible intelligence.”
Hopper remains an example of the type of leader people need.