Guide to the Grace Murray Hopper Collection

Scope and Contents

The material includes technical notes, operating instructions and descriptions relating to projects which Hopper participated in at Harvard during and after World War II and later in the private sector. These projects involved the creation of the Navy's Mark I, II and III "mechanical calculators" (the fore runners of today's computers) and the UNIVAC and ENIAC civilian models. The photographs document both equipment and Hopper with her colleagues at work and on social occasions. There are numerous published articles and memoranda by Hopper and others on various technical aspects of computers. Clippings of newspaper and magazine articles relating to computers and their development are also included, as well as periodicals and brochures. A "humor file" contains jokes and anecdotes collected by Hopper.

Much of the material is annotated by Hopper, primarily through notations on 3 x 5 white slips of paper. Some of the annotations by Elizabeth Luebbert, who served as a summer research assistant in the Museum's Computer History Project.

Arrangement

The collection is divided into twelve series.

Series 1: Technical Documents, 1944-1949

Series 2: Photographs of Mark II, 1948

Series 3: Photographs at Harvard, 1944-1945

Series 4: Reports and Articles, 1946-1948

Series 5: Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, 1949-1965

Series 6: Compiling Routines, 1952-1954

Series 7: Press Clippings, 1944-1953

Series 8: Periodicals and Brochures, 1950-1953

Series 9: Humor file, 1944-1953

Series 10: Machine Tape, undated

Series 11: Audiovisual Materials, undated

Series 12: Addenda, 1949-1967

Biographical / Historical

Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University in 1934. She was an associate professor of mathematics at Vassar College when she joined the Women's Reserve of the United States Navy, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) in 1944 and was assigned to the computing project at Harvard University. She served under Commander Howard H. Aiken as a Wave until 1946, and remained at Harvard's Computation Laboratory as a research fellow until 1949. In that year she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician. When Eckert-Mauchly became a division of Remington Rand, Hopper remained as senior programmer, a title she retained until 1959.

Subsequently, she served as systems engineer and director of automatic programming development (1959-1964) and staff scientist in systems programming (1964-1971) for the UNIVAC division of Sperry Rand Corporation. Hopper retired from UNIVAC in 1972, having returned to active service in the U.S. Navy from which she eventually retired with the rank of Rear Admiral.

In 2016, President Obama posthumously awarded Rear Adm. Hopper the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nation's highest civilian honor, awarded to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interest of the U.S. for her remarkable influence on the field of computer science.

Related Materials

Computer Oral History Collection (AC0196)

This collection contains five oral history interviews with Grace Murray Hopper conducted on: July 1, 1968; November 1, 1968; January 7, 1969; February 4, 1969; and July 5, 1972.