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

 

 

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translate the program. You could write one in English and you could translate it and it could go 

to the xxxx. No problem, you’d have communication. It would be a limited vocabulary.  

The Need for User-Friendly LanguagesError! Bookmark not defined. 

Pantages:  

At that point did you have a feeling for what was happening, in terms of what you 

were contributing?  

Hopper:  

No. I’ve always objected to doing anything over again if I had already done it 

once.  That was building the compiler. Then I decided there were two kinds of people in the 

world who were trying to use these things. One was people who liked using symbols – 

mathematicians and people like that. There was another bunch of people who were in data 

processing who hated symbols, and wanted words, word-oriented people very definitely. And 

that was the reason I thought we needed two languages.  

The data processors did not like symbols, abbreviations that didn’t convey anything to them. 

They were totally accustomed to writing things in words. So why not give them a word-oriented 

language? And that was part of what was behind Flow-Matic B-0, which became one of the 

ancestors of COBOL.  

And that still makes sense to me. The other thing that bothers me is why we aren’t developing 

more languages. You’ll notice that when they began to program machine tools they got together 

all the people that used machine tools and developed the F APT language for programming 

machine tools.  

I still feel we need a lot more languages, not one. Everyone always wants to make the one all-

purpose do-everything language. I can make that very easily. All we would have to do is put 

every bit of English and every bit of mathematics into the computer and there it would be. It 

would be too big for everybody, too cumbersome. We would be continually trying to design 

subsets. 

What they should have done was build more languages for particular application areas. Now for 

instance, one of the ones that was most needed was biomedical for all these things in [various] 

units and the experimental work in biology. Why don’t we have a biomedical language that 

includes the words, the verbs, and the mathematical techniques that people in the biomedical 

field use? 

Pantages:  

It wasn’t MUMPS…  [MUMPS is a programming language created in the late 

1960s, originally for use in the healthcare industry.] 

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Hopper:  

It’s an English language, but it’s interactive, and of all the information you have to 

protect, it’s medical information. Hospitals are using it and because it’s interactive, you can get 

in there with no trouble at all. They haven’t discovered that yet, and it’s not going to protect 

privacy. But don’t put that in the article please. Let them find it out themselves. They’ll have to 

sooner or later. 

Pantages:  

It sounds like an issue we should all be talking about. 

Hopper:  

Well, we’ll get around to that later. It’s a very powerful group out there, the 

National Bureau of Standards, that is pushing MUMPS and I’m not about to fight [them]. Okay.  

What I was after in beginning English language was to bring another whole group of people able 

to use the computer easily. The people that used English, not symbols. It w as my own 

understanding of the different kinds of people, and I knew darn well most people didn’t like 

symbols. And you had to give them something else to work with, and obviously the next-best 

thing was English. 

Pantages:  

Again, did you realize the impact of your work? 

Hopper:  

I kept calling for more user friendly languages. I’ve always tried to do that, that’s 

why I want these other languages that are aimed at people. Most of the stuff we get from 

academicians, computer science people, is in no way adapted to people.  

[At this point, Hopper was handed a brochure about skiing in Bangor, ME, and her eyes lit up. 

”Oh boy look at that… Bangor, I love Bangor. I used to like cross-country skiing very much. I 

know I wasn’t going to get a chance to do that. And besides that, my bones were brittle enough 

by then so if I fell down I’d break something.”]  

Now that you’ve made me think about it, I think I’ve always been driving to make those things 

easier to use by everybody. Feeling that we needed greater use of it, more information 

processing, something had to be done to get people to use it.  

Pantages:  

That was the driving force. It was kind of funny given your background and your 

personality, having come out of the sciences, mathematics.  

Hopper:  

I wanted to be an engineer, but there was no place for women in engineering 

when I graduated.  

Pantages:  

I was going to ask you what you wanted to be… 

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Hopper:  

That was 1928, you see. My grandfather had been a civil engineer, and he was a 

senior civil engineer in the city of New York. He used to take me with him when he went out 

surveying, and he let me hold the red and white pole. And he also let me look through his 

gadget. And I wanted to be an engineer.  

My dad always made things, and I’ve always been fascinated with how things work and making 

things work. But there was no place at all for women in engineering when I graduated in 1928, 

and that’s why I went to the Math-Physics Center because at least they were making things 

work.  

I’ve also for some reason been able to explain things to people without necessarily using a 

technical vocabulary.  

Pantages:  

I noticed that about some of your writings in the 1950s – that I could understand 

them.  

Hopper:  

I could switch my vocabulary and speak highly technical for the programmers, 

and then tell the same things to the managers a few hours later but with a totally different 

vocabulary.  So I guess I’ve always been innately a teacher. 

So that again was what made me want to get user-friendly languages out so people could use 

them. 

[Further discussion on this era begins on page 25.] 

1980: Demands for the Future 

Application Processors, Database Machines, Distributed Processing 

Hopper:  

I could see people were going to need these things and the amount of 

information would increase. And I still think it’s going to increase even more. I don’t think we’ve 

even begun to recognize how much we are going to have to do with these computers. I don’t 

think people are facing what the future is going to be like. The big computers are not going to 

handle all the data. We’ll go to systems of computers. And the sooner we begin to do it the 

better. There’s never any reason to put inventory and payroll on the same computer, but we 

only did it because we had only one computer. There’s every reason to pull those off onto 

separate computers and dedicate them. We can simplify the software and run them in parallel, 

which makes things go much better.  

It will take a while to persuade people.  

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