Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, 1906–1992
For Grace Hopper, who taught computers to understand us.
This week, the celebration that carries her name should have opened. It was cancelled, so we lit a small one here.
Anaheim Convention Center, October 27–30, 2026
The week we were meant to meet
For more than thirty years, the Grace Hopper Celebration has been where women in computing find mentors, find jobs and find each other. This year it was due to open in Anaheim on October 27. About two weeks before, AnitaB.org called it off. Registrations and sponsorships had come in well below expectations, and the nonprofit didn’t have the money to go ahead.
We can’t give anyone back the hallway conversations, the career fair or the keynotes. What we can do is spend the week with the woman it is named for. If you were going, or wished you could, this page is for you.
Read her story. Catch the most famous moth in computing. Hold a nanosecond. Spell her name in binary. Then leave a lantern in the sky, and tell her what she started.
From AnitaB.org’s announcement and Hoodline’s report. Grace Hopper Celebration India is still planned for January 20–22, 2027, in Bengaluru.
Eighty-five years, punched in paper tape
The Harvard Mark I read its instructions from long strips of punched paper tape. Down the left, each year of her life is punched the same way, in binary: a hole is a 1, no hole is a 0.
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1906 New York City
The girl who took the clocks apart
Grace Brewster Murray was born on December 9, 1906. At seven she wanted to know how an alarm clock worked, so she took one apart. Then she took apart the rest of the household’s alarm clocks too: seven of them, by most accounts.
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1934 Vassar and Yale
A doctorate in mathematics
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with degrees in mathematics and physics, then earned a master’s (1930) and a PhD (1934) in mathematics at Yale, the twelfth woman to earn that doctorate there. She taught mathematics at Vassar from 1931, rising to associate professor.
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1943 U.S. Naval Reserve
Too old, too light, and going anyway
When the war came she wanted to serve, and the Navy saw problems. She was older than it wanted. At 105 pounds she was 16 pounds under its minimum for her 5-foot-6 frame. And her teaching job counted as essential war work. She got waivers, joined the Naval Reserve in December 1943, and graduated at the top of her class of 800 at the Midshipmen’s School at Smith College.
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1944 Harvard University
The third programmer of the Mark I
Lieutenant (junior grade) Hopper reported to Howard Aiken’s Mark I: 51 feet long, 8 feet high, about 5 tons, roughly three additions a second. She called herself its third programmer. Aiken told her she was going to write a book, so she wrote its 561-page manual. Among its wartime jobs were calculations for the Manhattan Project.
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1947 Harvard Mark II
The first actual bug
On September 9, the Mark II team traced a fault to a moth caught in Relay #70, Panel F, and taped it into the logbook.
Catch the moth yourself -
1949 Philadelphia
UNIVAC
She joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, which was building UNIVAC I, one of the first computers made for business. She stayed on as the company became part of Remington Rand and then Sperry Rand. There she learned from Betty Holberton, whose sort-merge generator gave her some of her first ideas about compiling.
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1952 A-0
The compiler nobody would touch
Programmers wrote every instruction in the machine’s own code. She wrote a program to do the translating for them, the A-0 compiler, and described it in a 1952 paper called “The Education of a Computer.”
“I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.”
Try a compiler -
1959 FLOW-MATIC and COBOL
Programs written in English words
She believed people running a business should be able to write programs in words they already used. Her team’s FLOW-MATIC did exactly that. In 1959 a committee that first met at the Pentagon set out to build one business language for every make of computer, drawing on FLOW-MATIC and two others. The result was COBOL, and it still runs in some of the U.S. government’s most critical systems.
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1967 Back in uniform
Six months that lasted nineteen years
The Navy retired her as a commander at the end of 1966, when she was 60. Seven months later it called her back to standardize its computer languages, for what was meant to be six months. She stayed nineteen years. She became a captain in 1973, and in 1983 President Reagan promoted her to commodore, a rank the Navy renamed rear admiral two years later.
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1986 USS Constitution, Boston
Retiring aboard Old Ironsides
On August 14, 1986, at 79, she retired aboard the oldest commissioned ship in the Navy, reported to be its oldest serving officer. Then she joined Digital Equipment Corporation as a senior consultant. She stayed with Digital for the rest of her life, giving talks until about a year and a half before she died.
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1992 Arlington, Virginia
New Year’s Day
Grace Hopper died at her home in Arlington, Virginia, on New Year’s Day 1992, at 85. She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
The first actual bug
On September 9, 1947, the Harvard Mark II misbehaved. The operators traced the fault to Relay #70 on Panel F, where a moth had been caught, and taped it into the logbook with a note.
Engineers had called glitches “bugs” since Thomas Edison’s day in the 1870s, so the joke was finding a real one. The moth wasn’t Grace’s find, and the logbook probably wasn’t hers either. But she worked on the Mark II, loved the story, and told it so often that it became part of computing folklore. The page, moth and all, is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, though it isn’t on display right now.
Read the page
Each line follows that day’s page, with the morning’s check figures and shorthand drawn as scribbles. Tap one to see what was happening.
Talk to the machine in words
Before compilers, people wrote programs one machine instruction at a time, in the machine’s own code. Grace’s idea was to have a program, the compiler, do that translating, and then to let people write in something close to English. First, watch a few sentences turn into bits. Then write your own.
1Watch a compiler work
Press Compile to translate the sentences into instructions and bits. Then Step through them one at a time.
The toy computer and its codes are made up for this page, so the bits are easy to read. Real UNIVAC code looked different, but the idea is the same one: you write the words, the compiler writes the 0s and 1s.
2Now talk to it yourself
What a nanosecond looks like
An admiral wanted to know why it took so long to send a message by satellite. Grace answered in nanoseconds. She had asked the engineers to “cut off a nanosecond” for her: a piece of wire 11.8 inches long, the farthest light can travel in a billionth of a second. Then she handed them out to anyone who would hold one.
- 1 nanosecond11.8 inches (29.98 cm) of wire. A billionth of a second.
- 1 microsecondA coil of nearly 1,000 feet of wire (984 feet, by the physics). A millionth of a second.
- 1 picosecondShe handed out packets of pepper for these: each grain stood for a picosecond.
- 1986She explained the nanosecond to David Letterman on late-night television.
This 3D view needs WebGL. A nanosecond of wire is 11.8 inches long: about the length of a school ruler.
Slowed down a billion times
The glow is a pulse of light slowed down a billion times, so one nanosecond takes one second.
In her words
She kept a clock on her wall that ran counterclockwise. It told the right time, once you stopped expecting it to work the usual way.
Bitflip: spell her name in binary
Each gate on the river is one bit of ASCII. Match your bit to the gate, sail around the moths, and every eight gates you’ve written a letter. Her name comes first, then the words of her life, from Mark I to Amazing Grace, and every word is a harder level than the last.
- Match the gate. Flip your sail with Space, or tap the middle of the screen.
- Sail around the moths. Change lanes with ← →, or tap either side.
- Grab the compiler. Like her A-0, it writes your bits for one whole letter.
- Catch floating hearts. You start with five and can carry up to nine. Moths begin to wander at bug; glitch gates arrive with FLOW-MATIC.
- Keep a streak. Eight gates in a row without a mistake raise your points multiplier by one, up to ×8. A mistake resets it to ×1.
Words of her life
Decode a word in the game and it lights up here.
Leaderboard
Loading the board…
Where her name sails today
She collected more than forty honorary degrees and a long list of firsts. Today her name rides on a warship, a college, a park, a celebration and a line of chips.
Her name in the international code of signals, the flags ships use to talk to each other.
- 1969
Computer Science “Man of the Year”
The Data Processing Management Association gave her the first one. The name of the prize had some catching up to do.
- 1971
The Grace Murray Hopper Award
Started by Sperry Rand and given by the ACM to a young computer professional for a major contribution made at 35 or younger. Donald Knuth won the first.
- 1973
British Computer Society
Made a Distinguished Fellow, the first American and the first woman of any nationality.
- 1991
National Medal of Technology
The first woman to receive it as an individual. At 84 she couldn’t travel to the Rose Garden, so the president of the Society of Women Engineers accepted it for her.
- 1994
Grace Hopper Celebration
Anita Borg and Telle Whitney named a gathering of women in computing for her. About 450 people came to the first one in Washington.
- 1997
USS Hopper (DDG-70)
A Navy destroyer commissioned in San Francisco. Her crew calls her Amazing Grace.
- 2010
Hopper, the supercomputer
The Energy Department’s NERSC center named its Cray XE6 for her. It passed a petaflop and ranked fifth in the world that November.
- 2016
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Awarded after her death, in the same ceremony that honored Margaret Hamilton, who led the software team for Apollo.
- 2017
Grace Murray Hopper College
Yale renamed one of its residential colleges for her.
- 2021–22
Grace and Hopper
NVIDIA named its Grace CPU and its Hopper data-center GPUs for her. The Hopper chips became workhorses for training AI.
- 2023
COBOL, still at work
When government auditors reviewed ten of the most critical old federal computer systems, several still ran on COBOL.
- Arlington
Grace Murray Hopper Park
Arlington County, Virginia, where she spent her last years, has a park in her name.
The women beside her, and after her
She was often the only woman in the room, and she never acted as if that settled anything. Here are some of the women who worked beside her and who came after, and how far there still is to go.
For the first time, more women than men
In September 2025 NASA introduced its 24th class of astronaut candidates: six women and four men, picked from more than 8,000 applicants. No class in NASA’s history had included more women than men.
- 1951
Betty Holberton
One of the six programmers of ENIAC. Her sort-merge generator at Eckert–Mauchly was, Grace said, where her own first ideas about compiling came from.
- 1959
Jean Sammet
A key member of the committee that designed COBOL. In 1974 she became the first woman to lead the ACM, the world’s largest computing society.
- 1969
Margaret Hamilton
Led the team that wrote the onboard flight software for Apollo.
- 1994
Anita Borg and Telle Whitney
Founded the Grace Hopper Celebration. About 450 people came to the first one; by 2023, 29,000 took part.
- 2006
Frances Allen
The first woman to win the Turing Award, computing’s highest honor, for her work on compilers. Barbara Liskov (2008) and Shafi Goldwasser (2012) followed.
- 2014
Admiral Michelle Howard
The first woman to wear four stars in the U.S. Navy. In 2023 Admiral Lisa Franchetti became the first woman to lead the Navy as Chief of Naval Operations, and served until President Trump removed her in February 2025.
- 2019
Christina Koch and Jessica Meir
The first spacewalk made only by women. Koch’s 328 days in orbit are still the longest single spaceflight by a woman.
- 2026
Christina Koch, again
In April she flew around the Moon on Artemis II, the first woman to make that journey, on a crew that went farther from Earth than any people before them.
And what’s still unfinished
In 1984, women earned 37 percent of the computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States. By 2022 the share was about 23 percent (NCES).
And this year the celebration named for her couldn’t raise the money to open its doors. Grace spent her life refusing to accept “we’ve always done it this way.” Mentor someone. Hire someone. Hand someone a piece of wire.
The lantern sky needs WebGL, which isn’t available in this browser. You can still light a lantern, and read everyone’s words below.
Lights for Grace, from everywhere
Leave a light for Grace
Light a lantern and, if you like, tell her what she started for you. It rises with everyone else’s, and anyone, anywhere, can read it.
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No lanterns yet. Light the first one.
Every light, from everywhere
Every message left for her, newest first.
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