Grace Hopper: Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer Review

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(More customer reviews)Grace Hopper, Charlene W. Billings
Charlene W. Billings wrote a number of books for young people. This 1989 book is written for teenagers to fit on 128 pages. It would be better if it had more details and around 300 pages. It is worth reading for its history about the early days of digital computing machines. [Before the 1950s a "computer" was the person who used a slide-rule or an accounting machine.] In 1986 retiring Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was the oldest commissioned officer on active duty in the US Navy (Chapter 1). The book tells of her childhood, college student, marriage and teaching career (Chapters 2, 3, 4). During WW II she joined the US Naval Reserve and was sent to the Computation Project at Harvard University where Howard Aiken wrote about an Automatic Calculating Machine, the "Mark I". Grace worked on this project to code the instructions that controlled the machine (Chapter 8). Chapter 9 tells about the early Harvard Computers. Grace joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia Penna. The ENIAC was the first electronic computer with vacuum tubes. The UNIVAC became the best-known computer (Chapter 10). Grace became an advocate for a programming language to create machine language (Chapter 11). She wanted to use plain English words (Chapter 12). This universal computer programming language would be common to every computer company (Chapter 13). The result was COBOL.
The Defense Department required its use for any of its suppliers. She worked to test and standardize COBOL compilers (Chapter 14). Chapter 15 provides anecdotes about Grace. Standard interchangeable parts go back to Eli Whitney in the early 19th century, the assembly line to Cincinnati and Chicago slaughterhouses (p.94). Ford's low-cost automobiles met the needs of America. Those "railroads are falling apart" (p.96) because of a lack of government regulation since the Civil War, their greed and mismanagement. Information has value based on relevance, accuracy, and completeness. Grace thinks the home computer industry will grow larger (p.98). She did not foresee the growth of computers for entertainment. She said parallel computers in a network could out-perform one centralized processor (p.99). [Weren't big mainframe computers composed of networked computers that handled I/O?] Grace worried about the proper distribution and sharing of water (p.101). [That is a collective responsibility.] Chapter 16 summarizes her career and achievements. In 1985 Grace was promoted to Rear Admiral, the only woman admiral in the history of the US Navy. Our "greatest natural resource" is young people (p.112). Leadership is more important than management (p.113). The Navy retired Grace at age seventy-nine; she then worked as a consultant to DEC. [There is an error on page 119: 10100110 does not stand for decimal 83 but for decimal 166.] There is an amazing list of awards on pages 121 to 124, most from the 1980s.

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