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

 

 

CHM Ref: 

X5142.2009

                    © 1980 Computer History Museum                           Page 

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So I developed what I called neutral corner – I got it from playing basketball. This was to go 

forward, so I had a jump down to what I called neutral corner. Then I put a flag up, I’ve got a 

message for you, and in each step, each glob, I looked down to see if I had a flag for it. And if I 

did, I’d put another jump from there to that operation.  

At the cost of one extra jump I had a one-pass compiler. You went zooming through the 

computer, you didn’t go back, you didn’t have separate runs, and all that stuff.  

Pantages:  

How did you get together with Eckert and Mauchly? 

Hopper:  

In 1949 when people knew I had run out the time at Harvard, (and I guess 

everyone in the industry knew it) practically everyone asked me to come for interviews, 

including IBM.  I went to the IBM headquarters and they gave me a huge [offer]. 

I was one of the very few people who did not work for IBM. I went for interviews with practically 

every computer manufacturer that there was at the time. Honeywell, RCA was thinking about it, 

Burroughs was in it.  

But it was John Mauchly I just couldn’t miss. Working for him was obviously going to be a great 

pleasure. He was a wonderful guy, one of the best that ever lived. 

Pantages:  

Did they want you to do something special? 

Hopper:  

No, they were then building the programming group for Univac I. At the interview 

there was both John and Betty Holberton. And Betty has never received the credit for the work 

she did and should have received long since.  

Pantages:  

Where is she now? 

Hopper:  

She’s retired. I think she’s still part time at the National Bureau of Standards. 

Everybody’s forgotten that she wrote the first program that wrote a program. She wrote that 

sort-merge generator, and what she did was feed in the specs for the data you were handling 

and the keys and that sort of thing, and then it generated the sort program for that specific data. 

That’s the first time to my knowledge that anyone used the computer to write a program. Betty 

did that. I don’t think she’s ever fully received the credit for what she did in that case.  

Then she got out and got buried in NBS. Nobody heard from her after that, which is just a 

shame. That first work she did was that automatic generation stuff for Univac I. I’m not sure that 

I would necessarily have gotten done what I did get done if she hadn’t been ahead of me, so to 

speak.  

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CHM Ref: 

X5142.2009

                    © 1980 Computer History Museum                           Page 

9

 of 54

 

 

 

 

Knowing that she had used a program to generate a program, I had a good deal more nerve to 

go ahead and build the first A-O compiler. It finally got called AT-3.  

That’s the one where I got into trouble. We built a preliminary compiler, a model which would 

only take 20 statements but had all the controls in it, in order to get the budget. We had this 

program, but the more we looked, the smaller it looked. It looked so trivial and we were asking 

for the biggest budget we had ever asked for. So we decided we ought to do something more.  

We had carefully fixed it so that each statement began with a verb. Now the only type of 

statement that is coming across in all languages is the command imperative. We simply 

substituted the words in French and German and ran the program in French and German, 

simply the verbs and nouns. It showed that we could do it not only in English. But that idea got 

clobbered because it was perfectly obvious that a computer built in Philadelphia could not 

understand French and German.  

But that was in the original program. Eventually it did appear in most languages. And then what 

happened was even stranger. You look at programs in Sweden and you find English verbs and 

connecting words and nouns in Swedish. In Germany, you find English verbs and connecting 

words and nouns in German. In Japan, it’s even more so, because, if you look at the Japanese 

COBOL text, you find verbs and connecting words and Roman characters in English and the 

nouns in Japanese and Japanese characters. 

Actually, COBOL has become a language you can talk to programmers around the world. We 

had proposed that originally and it sure got clobbered.  

Pantages:  

I guess I don’t understand…why would they clobber it? 

Hopper:  

It was obvious that an American computer in Philadelphia couldn’t understand 

German. 

Pantages: 

 Who was making these obvious statements? 

Hopper:  

Non-computerized management; Marketing particularly. 

Pantages:  

Univac would have cornered the international market. 

Hopper:  

I would have thought it would be useful to NATO, because I thought they had the 

common verbs for the things they were going to do. And the nouns, they’d just have to have a 

dictionary for things they were referring to for inventory control and other things like that. They’d 

have common nouns throughout NATO, and they could make a dictionary of common verbs and 

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