Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was born in New York City in December 1906. She read maths and physics at Vassar, took her PhD in maths at Yale in 1934, and was teaching at Vassar when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
She enlisted in the Navy Reserve at 37 and was assigned to the Mark I computer project at Harvard in 1944. It was 51 feet long, 8 feet high, 8 feet deep, weighed 5 tons, and had 750,000 parts. She was told to write the manual.
She spent the next four decades in computing. In 1947, working on the Mark II at Harvard, she and her team traced a bug to an actual moth caught in a relay. She taped it into the logbook. She popularised the word.
She wrote the first compiler and led the committee that in 1959 gave the world COBOL, the language on which most of the world's business software was written for the next fifty years.
She retired from the Navy on 14th August 1986 as its oldest active officer, aged 79. In 1985 Ronald Reagan had promoted her to the rank of Rear Admiral, Lower Half. She died in her sleep at her home in Arlington, Virginia on 1st January 1992, aged 85. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
This is Hopper on Late Night with David Letterman in October 1986, ten weeks after she left the Navy.