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Old March 23rd, 2008, 12:17 AM
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Default Re: WWII Forums Quiz Part VII

Ta Da!!

Skunkworks has got it right!

From Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
About Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

".... After Pearl Harbor, Hopper decided to serve her country during World War II. In 1943 Hopper was sworn into the United States Navy Reserve. She was commissioned a Lieutenant (JG) and was ordered to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. She became the first programmer on the Navy's Mark I computer. Hopper loved this 8 foot high, 8 foot wide gadget filled with relays, switches and vacuum tubes. Once, while working on Mark I, a group of admirals came to see the machine in action. Earlier that day, something failed and was causing the computer to shut down every several seconds. Hoppers quick thinking saved her and her staff some embarrassment. She leaned against the machine and kept her finger discreetly on the start button the whole time to keep the computer running. The Mark I made mistake after mistake but the admirals didn't notice. They left thinking they witnessed and error free run.

In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. She traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitch's in a program a bug. In 1946 she joined the Eckert-Machly Computer Corporation (later called Sperry Rand). At Eckert-Machly she helped design the first commercial electronic computer called the UNIVAC. The UNIVAC operated a thousand times faster than the Mark I."

Your go, skunk works.
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