What Happened on December 9th

Grace Murray Hopper, one of the first women to work on the computer, is born in New York City. Hopper, a rear admiral in US Navy, did significant work on the Harvard Mark II, where she discovered the first computer bug -- a moth -- and coined the term to mean a problem with a program. Hopper went on to develop the first compiler, A-0, and the programming language COBOL. She died on January 1, 1992.

Grace Hopper was honored by having an advanced US Navy warship named after her, the USS Hopper, launched in mid-1997.