![]() It would require a thinking process that could retrain itself with each advance, while remaining perfectly in step with the computer. To develop the further potential of the computer, however, would require something more than mathematics, something even more than mere knowledge. The schoolgirl who had to repeat a year of Latin had grown up to join a hell-bent chase in the mid-1950s to make a new language. They looked to the mathematics departments of the country’s colleges. To operate the Mark I, the builders needed to find people with similarly trained minds. The patterns in the calculus were based on accepted formulas with logical progressions. “The calculus of finite differences has become the bridge between mathematical analysis and numerical computation,” Grace Hopper wrote early in her career with computing machines. The computer was born out of the mathematical study of finite differences - the reflection of the abstract in the real, through the use of formulas established in the purified realm of symbols. Very few people could hope to communicate with the computer in those earliest days, because few people could as yet adapt themselves to think in its peculiar patterns. It had its own one-of-a-kind language along with its own ways of absorbing information and analyzing it. Hopper wasn’t on hand to gape, though she was there to communicate with the machine. Even to someone who had always liked gadgets, the Mark I was preposterous, a 51-foot wall of clatter and light. In 1944, when she first saw Harvard’s Mark I Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, one of the earliest modern computers, she was not merely impressed but startled. But Hopper was also one 49 years later when she died, still on the job. When Hopper entered the field in 1944, as she later recalled, “you could fit everyone who had ever heard the word computer into one small room.” They were all wunderkinds then. The computer industry has managed to leave nearly every former wunderkind behind by the sheer pace of its change. But not as rare as something else she would later be: an octogenarian in the computer industry. As one of the highest-ranking females ever to serve in the Navy, she was rare. “This is the first time a woman has ever given a presentation in this room,” she was once told at the Pentagon as she was escorted to a meeting with the Secretary of the Navy. Grace Hopper, an American mathematician and pioneer in developing computer technology, at the helm of the UNIVAC keyboard, circa 1960. But not as rare a bird as an octogenarian in the computer industry, another distinction she would hold. As one of the highest-ranking females ever to serve in the Navy, she was a rarity. “This is the first time a woman has ever given a presentation in this room,” Grace Hopper was once told at the Pentagon, as she was escorted to a meeting with the Secretary of the Navy.
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