Tech

Grace Hopper

Needed waivers for age and weight to join the Navy; retired at 79 as its oldest active officer.

Born: 1906 · New York City, US
Roots: White American; Dutch and Scottish descent
Family: Affluent; A comfortable Manhattan household; her insurance-executive father insisted his daughters be educated like sons.
Education: Vassar → Yale (PhD in mathematics, 1934)
Started with: A Navy waiver; Underweight and over-age in 1943, she needed exemptions to join the WAVES; the Navy sent her to program the Mark I.
Affiliations & societies: None documented.; Information only — claims like these are often unverifiable and may be wrong.

The pathway

1943 · age 36
Joins the WAVES
Leaves a Vassar professorship for the war effort.
1944 · age 37
The Mark I
Third programmer of Harvard's room-sized computer, under Howard Aiken.
1947 · age 40
The first "bug"
Her team tapes an actual moth from a relay into the logbook: "First actual case of bug being found."
1952 · age 45
The A-0 compiler
"Nobody believed it," she recalled. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it."
1959 · age 52
COBOL
Her FLOW-MATIC becomes the foundation of the business-programming language.
1986 · age 79
Final retirement
A rear admiral, the Navy's oldest active-duty officer; she hands out nanosecond-length wires to explain latency.

Sources

Compiled from these references and contemporaneous press reporting. Figures are approximate; verify before relying on them.