Ada & Grace: Practical Visionaries

I wrote this paper for a computer science course in Spring 2000. Sue Bogar, who was my instructor at UMBC encouraged me to take on this topic. I am indebted to Sue's excellent teaching, including her unforgettable presentation of the definition of an algorithm.

Lovelace and Hopper are by no means the only women who have made invaluable contributions to the field of computer science. Without Betty Holberton, who "devised the first sort-merge generator, for UNIVAC I" (AWC, "Frances..."), Grace Hopper would never have been able to design the first compiler. A more contemporary scientist, Dr. Anita Borg, has profoundly influenced the field by "designing and building a fault tolerant UNIX-based operating system" ("Short Biography of Anita Borg"), as well as developing a performance analysis method for high-speed memory systems. However, I've chosen to focus on Lovelace and Hopper because they are probably the most frequently mentioned women in computer science, and they represent two critical historical moments in the field: Lovelace helps to bring the first computer into being, while Hopper forges the start of the modern computer age.

A researcher looking into women and computer science will find Ada's and Grace's names scattered all over the place. Lovelace has a programming language named after her (Ada), the Association for Women in Computing offer the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award annually, and Yale University has TAP, or The Ada Project: Tapping Internet Resources for Women in Computer Science. Grace Hopper was the first woman to have a Navy destroyer named after her (USS Hopper), and the Institute for Women and Technology began the Grace Murray Celebration of Women in Computing in 1994. In trying to ascertain exactly what Ada and Grace accomplished, I've found that Grace Hopper's contributions are undisputed, perhaps because her accomplishments are more recent and well documented, while Ada Lovelace's importance to computer science is occasionally denied, as the following quote demonstrates:

It is often suggested that Ada was the world's first programmer. This is nonsense... Ada was probably the fourth, fifth or six [sic] person to write the programmes. Moreover all she did was rework some calculations Babbage had carried out years earlier. Ada's calculations were student exercises. Ada Lovelace figures in the history of the Calculating Engines as Babbage's interpretess, his "fair lady." As such her achievement was remarkable. ("Augusta Ada Lovelace")

Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace (1815-1852), the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, called herself the "High-Priestess of Babbage's Engine" (Toole 197), and I think of her as a midwife of sorts. Lovelace met Babbage at a party in June, 1833 (Ada was nineteen years old, Babbage was forty-two) and later visited Babbage's home to see his Difference Engine, which "worked on the theory of calculating differences" (Toole 37) and was "about the size of a small modern business computer" (Toole 38). Babbage had received government money in 1823 to develop this first calculating machine, but ten years later, the funding was gone and the machine unfinished. In 1834, a year after Lovelace and Babbage met, Babbage began to conceptualize the Analytical Engine, the first computer. Ada clearly understood the quantum leap from calculator to thinking machine, and was convinced that the British government needed to fund Babbage's work, or another nation might succeed where England failed.

Ada's material production consists of a translation of an article (written 1842-43) and Notes (written mostly during the summer of 1843), which were longer than the translation and fully described and explained the Analytical Engine. The material production seems slim, but it is crucial. Ada lived at a time when computers were unimaginable, except to a few mathematicians. She was a self-taught mathematician, who thought that "Differential Calculus is king of the company; - & may it ever be so!" (Toole 113), a mother of three, and a daughter who complained about her own mother's strict adherence to facts and denial of fancy. In a letter to her mother, Ada writes, "You will not concede me philosophical poetry. Invert the order! Will you give me poetical philosophy, poetical science?" (Toole 11)

Ada's ability to meld poetry and science gave her the means for understanding and explaining the revolutionary importance of the Analytical Engine. Although Ada met Babbage in 1833, their working relationship really began in early 1843. In 1842, Babbage presented his plans for the Analytical Engine at a meeting of philosophers in Turin, Italy. L. F. Menabrea, an Italian engineer, was at the meeting and then wrote an article which summarized the Analytical Engine. This article, published in French in a Swiss journal (October, 1842) was the one Ada translated into English and then showed to Babbage, who asked her why she hadn't written her own piece on the machine. On Babbage's advice, Ada agreed to write her own Notes to add to the translation.

Some critics who clearly missed the revolutionary nature of the Analytical Engine thought Babbage should finish the Difference Engine, and Ada takes pains in her Notes to address this criticism: "... an engine which can effect these four operations [+, -, x, /] can in fact effect every species of calculation ... in the one case the execution of these four operations is the fundamental starting-point, and the object proposed for attainment by the machine [Analytical] is the subsequent combination of these in every possible variety ... The one begins where the other ends..." (Toole 175). Or, from Note A, Ada explains the difference another way: "The Analytical Engine, on the contrary, is not merely adapted for tabulating the results of one particular function and no other, but for developping and tabulating any function whatever. In fact the engine may be described as being the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity ..." (Toole 176)

Ada uses language that contemporary programmers would understand well enough: she talks of operations, cycles, and fixed variables. She foresees computer-generated music: "Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent..." (Toole 179). She recognizes and explains the possibilities of "if" statements, which give the machine powers of both analysis and synthesis.

The Analytical Engine relied on punch cards for input, and Babbage adapted the punch cards designed by Jacquard, who used the cards to instruct the Jacquard loom to weave specific patterns. Ada explains the concept as follows: "A method was devised of what was technically designated backing the cards in certain groups according to certain laws. The object of this extension is to secure the possibility of bringing any particular card or set of cards into use any number of times successively in the solution of one problem ..." (Toole 187).

In their working relationship, Ada was the taskmaster and meticulous overseer; she complained to Babbage about his sloppiness and upbraided him for mistakes; she fussed at the publishers when they forgot to include revisions; and she worked steadily through ill health to bring the work to the public eye. When Babbage wanted to add a preface that detailed the lack of governmental support, Ada told him that was suicidal, and refused to have her work published with such a preface. After that argument, their friendship continued but their working relationship ended.

Perhaps the highest praise for Ada comes from Babbage himself, who says in a letter to Ada's son Byron written after Ada's death: "In the memoir of Mr. Menabrea and still more in the excellent Notes appended by your mother you will find the only comprehensive view of the powers of the Anal. Engine which the mathematicians of the world have yet expressed" (Toole 193).

As a disciplinary descendant, Grace Murray Hopper followed Ada's path by focusing on mathematics; she was one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1934. She lived a much longer life than Ada -- a full eighty-five years (9 Dec. 1906 - 1 Jan. 1992) compared to Ada's too short thirty-seven. Even given that extended time span, it's difficult to imagine how one woman accomplished so much. She received forty-seven honorary degrees, was the first American (and the first woman ) inducted as a Distinguished Fellow in 1973 into the British Computer Society, and in 1969, she "received the first computer sciences 'man-of-the-year' award from the Data Processing Management Association" (Danis).

Hopper's math career shifted into computers in 1943 when she joined the United States Navy Reserve and was sent to Harvard University to work on the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project and "became the first programmer on the Navy's Mark I computer" (Danis), which was the first programmable digital computer. After the war, Hopper continued at Harvard as faculty in the Computation Laboratory. She worked on the Mark II and III, and it was during her work there that "She traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug" (Danis).

In 1946, Hopper moved from the military to business, and worked for corporations such as the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which Sperry Rand bought after J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the developers of ENIAC, designed Univac. ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzer and Computer) could be considered Babbage's unrealized Analytical Engine, finally created and built a century later. Univac used high-speed magnetic tape rather than the standard punch cards and was thus a huge improvement over ENIAC. Hopper worked on Univac and acted as systems engineer and director of automatic programming at Sperry Rand from 1952 to 1964.

In 1952, Hopper created the first compiler, an accomplishment that should endear her to any computer scientist, and programmers in particular. With all the programming languages we have today, it's difficult to imagine a world where programmers wrote lengthy binary code that was hugely labor-intensive, time-consuming, and invited a magnitude of errors. To appreciate the enormity of this contribution, perhaps a linguistic analogy might help: a programmer using a compiler compares to someone speaking with words, while a programmer using binary compares to someone speaking with letters.

Hopper and her staff also created Flow-matic, the first programming language to use English words, and Flow-matic was eventually incorporated in COBOL (common-business-oriented-language), the first programming language designed for commerce. Today we take the conjunction of business and computers for granted, but by the late 50s and early 60s, computers had been solely the domain of scientists and the military. Hopper's contributions to COBOL demonstrate her concern that computers be widely accessible:

Before COBOL was designed, the leading computer companies were competing to be the first to come up with such a business language. Hopper hated the idea of the waste involved in this. She was an early backer of standardization and compatibility between computer systems, but these big companies could not join forces to create a common language without violating antitrust laws. So Hopper and other academics -- and the Defense Department -- formed a committee to devise the language. ("Grace Murray Hopper")

Like Ada, Grace Murray Hopper was a great thinker. One anecdote says that she had a clock in her office that ran counterclockwise; this reminded her that there was always more than one solution to a problem. As a teacher, Hopper often used a physical demonstration to lecture future computer scientists about not wasting time. Pulling out a piece of foot-long wire, Hopper explained the wire represented a nanosecond, which was "the maximum distance electricity could travel in wire in one billionth of a second" (Danis). Then she would display a coil of wire about one thousand feet long and explain that it represented a microsecond -- certainly something no programmer would want to waste.

Grace Hopper's attitude towards progress and change is captured in a statement she made during a 1983 television interview: "It is much easier to apologize than to get permission." She explains this philosophy through an anecdote about a young lieutenant who defied a Navy ship's belief that the ship was too small to have a computer on board. The lieutenant brought his own computer, loaded the ship's records, and got excellent reports out on time. As Hopper said, when the lieutenant left the ship, "The captain had to buy his computer as the ship could not run without it any more. He didn't have to apologize. He did it" (Danis).

Given the enormous contributions to computer science by only these two women, Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, one might think that women would make up a large percentage of computer scientists. But the opposite is true. From 1985 to 1995, undergraduate degrees awarded in computer science dropped for both men and women, and women went from 36% of total degrees earned in 1985 to 28% earned in 1995 (GirlTECH). One might think that younger girls who have grown up with computers might be more inclined to choose computer science as a course of study. But that is also not true. In 1997, the number of young women high school students who took the Advanced Placement Computer Science test made up only a paltry 17% of the total (GirlTECH).

Anyone examining the field of computer science at the start of the 21st century would have to conclude that women and girls are in trouble. Here are a few more statistics:

• Only 16% of scientists, 6% of engineers and 4% of computer scientists in the U.S. are women.
• 34% of high school aged girls reported being advised by a faculty member not to take senior math.
• Nearly 75% of tomorrow's jobs will require use of computers; fewer than 33% of participants in computer courses and related activities are girls. (AWSEM)

In a recent PBS documentary, "Digital Divide," a middle-school teacher asks her students to draw pictures of computer scientists: not one draws a female. In the 60 Minutes broadcast on "Women and the Web" aired on March 19, 2000, Leslie Stahl interviewed the owners of iVillage, arguably the most heavily trafficked portal for women on the web. As the camera moves to the back room, we see a cramped space filled with terminals --- and not one single woman. All the techies are young men. These two instances demonstrate that a majority of people, women included, simply can't imagine women as computer scientists. And the claims that women are taking over the web simply demonstrate that women can now shop online, but they still don't design the search engines, program the machines, or develop hardware to any great degree. Perhaps one of Leslie Stahl's interviewees stated this schism of use and design best when she asked, "Do you think we'd have the mammogram machine if a woman had designed it?"

Many of the programs designed to encourage women and girls to study science, math, engineering and technology all mention the importance of role models and mentors. To that, I would add the critical importance of studying history. Learning about Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper has given me a new perspective on women's contributions to computer science. These names are no longer simply ones I recognize but tell me that without Grace and Ada, and other women who combine vision with application, programmers might still be coding in binary and the computer itself might only be an unread footnote in a dusty book.

AWC - Association for Women in Computing. "Frances Elizabeth Snyder Holberton, known as Betty Holberton." Augusta Ada Lovelace Awards. http://www.awc-hq.org/lovelace/1997.htm (28 March 2000).

AWC - Association for Women in Computing. "Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, USNavy." Augusta Ada Lovelace Awards. http://www.awc-hq.org/lovelace/1983.htm (11 March 2000).

"Augusta Ada Lovelace." The Babbage Pages. 1996. http://www.ex.ac.uk/BABBAGE/ada.html (11 March 2000).

AWSEM - Associate of Women in Science, Engineering and Mathematics. "Facts in Brief." AWSEM Gender Equity. http://www.awsem.org (2 Feb. 2000).

Danis, Sharron Ann. "Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper." 2 Feb. 1997. http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Hopper.Danis.html (17 March 2000).

GirlTECH. "Introduction." Getting Girls Interested in Computers. 1998. http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/club/girls.html (7 Feb. 2000).

"Grace Murray Hopper: 1906-1992." A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries (PBS). 1998. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/btmurr.html (17 March 2000).

"Short Biography of Anita Borg." Institute for Women and Technology. http://www.iwt.org/trubio.html (20 March 2000).

Toole, Betty Alexander. Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age. Mill Valley CA: Strawberry Press, 1998.

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