Grace Hopper – Leadership Quality of Excellence
Can you imagine a world without computers today? Can you imagine doing the simplest jobs that we take for granted without computers? However, how old do you think computers are?
Have you noticed how the science of computers keeps on coming every year with more and more new developments? Today computers are the science that keeps searching for excellence. The people that are responsible for those developments demonstrate the leadership quality of the will to excel.
Not long ago computers were machines that only the Navy, big business and government had. They used to take the space of a huge rooms and sometimes whole buildings.
The revolution of computers opened a new era in human technology and development. The impact of those first computers on our daily life might not be recognized today due to the second wave of revolution that was done by Bill Gates and Microsoft which allowed bringing computers into our homes and daily activities (mobile phones, MP3 etc..) . But without those first breakthroughs that where done in the 40’s and 50’s this new era would not have been possible.
On December 9, 100 years ago, was born one of the first pioneers that created those breakthroughs. This was Grace Hopper. Not only was she a pioneer in the field of computers and sciences, Grace Hopper also paved the way for women’s participation on an equal basis in this field. Even at age seven, Grace Hopper showed a particular love for gadgets, disassembling seven alarm clocks in the attempt to determine how they worked.
Grace Hopper’s parents provided a strong foundation for her inquisitiveness. She shared her love of math with her mother, who studied geometry by special arrangement when serious study of math was still thought improper for a woman. Her father, a successful insurance broker despite the double amputation of his legs, encouraged all his children, through his speech and example, that they could do anything if they put their minds to it. He inspired Hopper to pursue higher education and to avoid being limited to typical feminine roles.
Grace Hopper had many achievements as a mathematician and educator, perhaps her best-known contribution to computing was the invention of the compiler, the intermediate program that translates English language instructions into the language of the target computer. Grace Hopper did this, she said, because she was lazy and hoped that “the programmer may return to being a mathematician.” Her work embodied or foreshadowed enormous numbers of developments that are now the bones of digital computing: subroutines, formula translation, relative addressing, the linking loader, code optimization, and even symbolic manipulation of the kind embodied in Mathematica and Maple.
Grace Hopper was a true visionary; she conceptualized how a much wider audience could use the computer if there were tools that were both programmer-friendly and application-friendly. In pursuit of her vision she risked her career in 1949 to join the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and provide businesses with computers. There she began yet another pioneering effort of UNIVAC I, the first large-scale electronic digital computer. To ease their task, Admiral Hopper encouraged programmers to collect and share common portions of programs. Even though these early shared libraries of code had to be copied by hand, they reduced errors, tedium, and duplication of effort.
Admiral Grace Hopper symbolizes the leadership quality of the will to excel. Although Grace Hopper had a career decorated with many rewards, she had to prove herself repeatedly. She once said “If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you’ve just proven a natural law!â€?
So next time you open your computer take some time to acknowledge those that have given us this freedom!
Have a great day!
