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

 

 

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desirability of small systems and distributed processing, which is the earliest recollection of the 

discussion on that issue.  

[Jack Jones, the head of computing at Southern Railway and subsequently information systems 

vice president of Norfolk Southern Railway, was also a pioneer in CODASYL’s creation and 

COBOL’s development and remained a leader throughout CODASYL’s existence.] 

Hopper:  

And the reality of the thing was the way IBM pushed the industry, partly for 

economics. I was on the other side of the fence. 

Pantages:  

Yours may have been more realistic. But I think IBM had put dollars and cents 

behind the thing [mainframes], having figured out how to make the most money. 

Hopper:  

But in the long run I’ve got the information to be done my way. And COBOL won, 

not PL/I.  

Back to 1943-1949: Howard Aiken 

Programming: Aiken’s Idea 

Pantages:  

We talked a little about your time with Aiken and Mauchly. 

Hopper:  

Aiken was very much practical, the same as I was; he was an engineer. He didn’t 

start out as a mathematician. He was an electrical engineer. Electrical power engineer as a 

matter of fact – before he had to write a thesis and found he needed a computer. He had gone 

back to Harvard to get his doctorate degree. He got interested in the ionosphere and bouncing 

radio signals off the ionosphere. He got into some nice complicated equations and he was 

pounding them out on calculators. And he wanted to study the ionosphere some more. He got 

fascinated by it. And so he ended up in computers. He had to have a computer; he couldn’t do it 

all in his lifetime. 

Pantages:  

Was that in the early 40s?  And you showed up there.  

Hopper: 

I was ordered in there. I think Aiken’s first paper proposing a computer was in the 

1930s, 1937 to 1939, and it’s in that Brian Randell book.  He was going to have a switchboard 

and all these different pieces hitched to it so he could perform the operations. It was almost a 

blueprint, a background, for Mark I.  

[“The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers” edited by Brian Randell (Berlin and New 

York: Springer-Verlag “Text and Monographs in Computer Science,” 1982)] 

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And I think we’ve neglected him, because his computer was programmed.  It may have been 

built out of relays and step counters, but it was just programmed the way we do it today, step by 

step.  ENIAC wasn’t, ENIAC was plugged together. And I get awful tired when everyone credits 

Von Neumann with the programming idea because it was Aiken’s, and Von Neumann had been 

up there to run problems. And when it comes down to the actual question of construction code 

for computers, basically in the heart of every computer is John Mauchly’s construction code.  It 

was Mauchly who designed the C1 code for UNIVAC. That UNIVAC I code is the heart of every 

code that’s ever been written for a computer, they just put bells and whistles on it.  

It had “bring,” “add,” “store,” “multiply,” “divide,” at the heart of every machine code. That’s the 

single address code.  

Pantages:  

Was Aiken conscious of (his impact on) programming concepts? 

Hopper:  

Yes, you know he built a coding machine for Mark III, and probably the reason 

we never hear about that is because it was mathematically oriented, not data processing 

oriented. And once you sat down at the coding machine, when you wanted to put a sine 

program in your program, you pushed the sine button. The coding machine was a relay machine 

that wrote a program. You had lots of keys and you just pushed the symbol you wanted. So he 

was definitely concerned with making it easy. You might say that’s where I got part – at least – 

of the concept of a compiler. 

What the coding machine did is check its relays and enter the subroutine in the program. Only I 

wanted it to be more flexible and not have the all-purpose ever-complete subroutine in my 

program. I wanted to modify it on the basis of the information I had. 

So many of the concepts that we live with day in and day out today were latent or evident in 

those early days. 

Pantages:  

Were there others? 

Hopper:  

For instance, Aiken did run the Prudential problem, using two digits for each letter 

and showing that you could run data processing on these machines. 

Pantages:  

Tell me about that. Did they come to Aiken with the problem or was it just fiddling 

around to see what would happen? 

Hopper:  

I don’t know which one initiated it, Aiken or Prudential.  

Pantages:  

Were they looking for a way to use the computer? 

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Hopper:  

They were looking to see if the computer was going to help them because they 

were running out of punch card machines. Of course, they were among the most advanced in 

the use of punched card machines. And here was a chance of sequencing without picking up 

the cards and walking across the room with them to the next machine. It would be continuous. 

So I don’t know if he went to them or they came to him. But up in the Aiken library there’s a copy 

of that original report, because I left my copy there.  

Pantages:  

Is that what sparked your thinking in terms of languages that would make it 

easier to use? 

Hopper:  

That was after I got down to Eckert and Mauchly. I didn’t really get into data 

processing until I got down there. And of course they had designed to build UNIVAC. It was built 

for data processing.  

Pantages: 

 Let’s go back to Aiken and Harvard and some of the people you worked with. 

You worked with Bloch. 

Hopper: 

 Bloch and Bob Campbell were there when I got there. They were both ensigns. 

Pantages:  

I didn’t know Bob Campbell. 

Hopper:  

He’s now I think at MITRE up in Boston. Bloch is up in New England, Boston, he 

works as a consultant. Bloch leaned more toward the hardware side, and Bob more toward the 

programming side. Yes, I said Bloch is the only person I ever knew who wrote a complete 

program in ink and was correct the first time. But Bloch just thought like the machine did. He 

was a mathematician of course, that was his degree.  

Pantages:  

At that point, everyone seemed to come out of mathematics and engineering into 

computing because they had problems to solve. 

Hopper:  

Most of the problems during the war dealt with ordinance of various kinds. It was 

during the war that we got the proximity fuse. We got the rockets, the things that were self-

propelled, instead of just giving them a shove and letting them go. Actually the Navy had a 

couple of guided missiles during the war, and the whole world of attack was changing 

completely. 

Pantages:  

The problems you were running, then, were in the design area?  

Hopper:  

That and for instance, they developed magnetic mines, where the big lump of 

steel would detonate the mine. Then you had to be able to sweep the mines. One of the 

problems I ran was towing a die pole behind a ship. How far away would it detect the steel? 

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