Microsoft Word Hopper Grace oral history. 1980. 102702026. final doc

 

 

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How big was its environment? Nobody knew at the time. So they were connected with new 

weapon systems basically.  

Pantages:  

Were you working with other developers at that point? 

Hopper:  

That’s how von Neumann got up there. There were lots of men in and out and 

our course for the radar school was just across the campus from us – there were problems from 

that. For many of the problems we just didn’t know what their application was. We were just told 

to make tables of certain functions. Practically everything was connected with the war. It wasn’t 

until after the war that we tried anything else. We had a hotline straight from the laboratory down 

to the Navy Bureau of Ordinance.  

Pantages:  

You left there in 1946.  

Hopper:  

No, 1949. I went to inactive duty in the Navy in 1946 and stayed under a three- 

year contract with Harvard, which was under the Navy contract. Navy had the contract with 

Harvard to build Mark III, which was later taken over by the Air Force.  

Aiken: The Value of Writing and Documentation 

Pantages:  

Incidentally, you said Aiken taught you the value of documentation, while 

teaching you how to write. People since then have said he put a very high value – logical thing 

to do – on documenting everything he did. 

Hopper:  

He sure did. And what’s more he taught me the best way to get something 

written, which I’d never thought of before – he told me to read it aloud.  He pointed out that if 

you stumble when you try to read it aloud, you’d better fix that sentence. Every day I had to read 

five pages of what I had written. And if I got stuck I’d go back and do it over again.  

That stuck with me ever since, so that instinctively I read it almost as I write and certainly read it 

over before it goes anywhere so that I know if I stumble I have a bad construction or the wrong 

word or something. And I immediately start to fix it. I think that’s one of the most important 

things about learning to write that ever happened. I’ve taught it to all the kids that have to write 

reports for me.  Read it aloud. 

Pantages:  

I wish I had taken a writing course from you. It took me years to learn that.  

Hopper:  

It does make a difference. It also keeps your sentences clear and simple, 

because you have to breathe at the right places. You don’t write this long turgid mess that most 

theoretical people write. He also taught me that if I’m going to give a talk I should tape it and 

listen to it.  If it gets bad at some spot, I might go back and do it over again. I taught my kids, I 

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kept a tape recorder in the office, so if they are going to give a presentation they could tape it 

and listen to themselves and make changes. 

He taught us all how to communicate. I’ve come to feel that there is no use doing anything 

unless you can communicate. And I include that in my talks. One of the most important things 

we have to do with our young people is teach them to communicate.  

Pantages:  

Probably a lost art at this moment. 

Hopper:  

It’s amazing what you can do. Now George came in there from Texas and I went 

to work on him naturally as I do with anyone that works for me. I’ve also felt that when people 

work for you and do something, you give them the credit, not you. So, when we had to give 

presentations to higher echelons, the committees and stuff, I’d take the whole crew along with 

me and then I’d present each one to give his section of the stuff. So they had to learn to speak. 

I’m not sure that George would be a GS-15 today; he came in as a third class petty officer.  

George is George Baird. He’s the one that’s now head of the Federal Compiler Testing Service. 

He’d just lap that stuff up. He came with a group in 1967 as a third-class petty officer. And he 

wrote all those beginning routines for testing COBOL. And the one thing he needed was to be 

able to present it. I gave him the practice and now he is a GS –15. 

Pantages:  

Howard Bromberg told me, “The first talk she made me give was a three-hour 

lecture at St. Paul.” 

[Howard Bromberg, who worked with Grace Hopper on program development at Univac, was on 

the original CODASYL Committee from 1959 to 1962, and hence one of the authors of the 

original COBOL. Moving to RCA in this period, he worked on the compiler for the RCA 501 for 

COBOL at the same time that the UNIVAC compiler was in process. He became the first 

chairman of the ANSI Standards Committee for COBOL] 

Hopper:  

I’ve always felt that the youngsters who work for me had to get the credit for the 

work they had done. And that they should be given the opportunity to present it. Also if they 

presented it, they’d get the questions and I couldn’t answer the questions anyway. And I always 

felt you had to give the credit to the people who really did it. And I’ve seen too many people – 

professors and businessmen everywhere – where the boss, even though all he’d done was to 

tell other people what to do, took all the credit for it. I never thought that was fair when you had 

people working for you who were developing things and inventing things.  

Anyway, what I did learn was the more you give it away, the more it always comes back to you 

in the long run anyway.  

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