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There Would Be No Steve Jobs Without Grace Hopper
If you’re familiar with any of the women who helped shape the computer age, the name of Ada Lovelace might ring a bell, but you should definitely also familiarize yourself with the name Grace Hopper. A colorful Navy veteran (the 11th woman to earn a doctorate in math from Yale University), Hopper reported for duty at Harvard University in 1944, expecting to be working on cryptography projects. But she ended up working with computer pioneer Howard Aiken on the “Mark I,” a 51-foot long, 8-foot tall electro-mechanical computer built to tackle advanced mathematics problems. A successor to the punched-card reader, the Mark I computed math problems by reading instructions from a punched paper tape and had 1,440 switches for manually entering data.
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