1976 · Minicomputer Disk Drives · Work 1198 of 1,871
A staff office in Washington on an August afternoon, venetian blinds striping the light, at the right a dark rack of three flat disk drives stacked, each with a smoked plastic lid and a plain black front strip with blank switches and amber lamps, beside it the woman, a woman of sixty-nine with short wavy white hair and large glasses, in a dark navy uniform jacket with black bow tie and four gold stripes on each cuff, one hand raised, her face in three-quarter view, in the foreground a young woman with a long dark ponytail seen from directly behind, head turned fully away.
Who
Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992) was a mathematician, programmer and officer of the US Navy who helped teach computers to understand words. Born in New York on 9 December 1906, she studied at Vassar College and took a PhD in mathematics at Yale in 1934. In 1943 she joined the Naval Reserve, and from 1944 she programmed the Mark I at Harvard, one of the first program-controlled computers ever built. From 1949 she worked in industry, finally in the UNIVAC division of Sperry Rand. There she and her team developed A-0, the first compiler, and Flow-Matic, the main forerunner of the business language COBOL; by the 1970s COBOL was the most widely used computer language in the world. She left the Reserve as a commander at the end of 1966; in August 1967 the Navy recalled her at the age of 60 to direct its programming languages group. In 1985 she became a rear admiral. When she retired in 1986, aged 79, she was the oldest serving officer in the US armed forces. She died on 1 January 1992. A Navy destroyer and a college at Yale University bear her name.
The moment
In August 1976 the Navy photographer David C. MacLean photographed Captain Grace Hopper, then 69, in her office. At the time she headed the programming languages section on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations. In one of the pictures she discusses a phase of her work with a staff member; the young woman sits with her back to the camera at a keyboard. On the right, three DECpack disk drives made by Digital Equipment Corporation are stacked one above the other, drives that took a disk cartridge behind a clear door. The Navy caption points them out specially. In another picture of the same series, manuals for the UNIVAC, the large computer of her industry years, stand on the shelves behind her desk. Hopper urged that work be taken off the big computer and that every task be given its own small computer. In 1980 she said: "I want everyone that has the big computer to gradually pull everything off and put it on small computers." The picture shows her with one hand raised beside the three drives.
The other side
Small computers everywhere came at a price, and it was spelled out in Hopper's own office in 1980. Richard Burdette of the Naval Data Automation Command said there: "Hardware is cheaper than ever before, but software isn't any cheaper." Writing programs was labour-intensive, and everywhere people were reinventing the wheel. Anyone in the Navy who stayed below the 10,000-dollar threshold could buy computers without permission; without standards these machines could not talk to each other. Hopper herself named the pioneers' big failure: they had never passed on modular programming, "we were too busy getting programs on the computers".
What the sources leave open: Only the month of the photograph, August 1976, is recorded, not an event; a sister picture is dated 1 August, a Sunday. The captions name neither the computer the drives served nor the building; the picture places the office in Washington. Blinds, light and colours are inferred, as the photograph is black and white. Face and uniform follow the public-domain Navy photograph; the staff member is seen from behind, as there.