The Birth of Hopper
On December 9, 1906, Grace Brewster Murray was born. She went on to graduate from Vassar College with a Bachelor's Degree in mathematics and physics, and continued her education at Yale, earning a master's degree in math and physics, and getting her PhD in mathematics. During this time, she had married Vincent Hopper, changing her name to Grace Murray Hopper. She joined the US Navy, working on the Mark I Calculator, and was the first person to write a program for it. After the war, she was discharged, but continued to work on the Mark II and Mark III calculators. It is during her time with the Mark II that she documented the now infamous "first computer bug". In 1949, she joined the UNIVAC I team, which was bought up in the early 1950s by the Remington Rand Corporation. It was during these early years with Rand that Grace Hopper wrote the world's first compiler, the A compiler. Her ideas and philosophies were used heavily in the creation of COBOL and FORTRAN, as she believed that computer languages could use syntax closer to that of English, rather than assembly. In her later years, Grace Hopper became a spokesperson and ambassador for the United States Navy. By the time of her retirement, she was a Rear Admiral, and the oldest officer in the Navy. From there she went on to be a spokesperson for the Digital Equipment Corporation until she passed away on January 1, 1992. For her extraordinary work in the area of computer science, proving that women can work beside men in this technical field, and being the person to write the world's first compiler, I have decided to name my fourth computer "Hopper" in her honour. The main objective of this computer is to further my experience in the world of computers, compilers, and all things of the sort.
As a recap, here is the list of my previous computers:
Babbage: Pentium 3 500Mhz, first computer to use the naming system. Named after Charles Babbage, the man who devised first mechanical calculator.
Mauchly: Pentium 4 1.4GHz, second computer to use the naming system. Named after John William Mauchly, the man who worked on the first electronic computer, ENIAC.
Cerf: Pentium 90Mhz, primary function was to act as a web server (http/ftp/svn/smb/...). Retired. Named after Vint Cerf, the man who co-invented TCP/IP.
This now brings us to Hopper. Hopper is an AMD64 Sempron 2600+ (1.6GHz) on an ASUS K8V-X SE Socket 754 motherboard. With 512MB of ram and a GeForceFX 5200, I'm expecting this computer to be a serious workhorse (as opposed to playhorse). There should also be no shortage in coding space, as Hopper is adorned with a 200GB SATA Maxtor Drive. One of the important things that I wanted to get was 64-bit because I know that 64-bit programming will become more important in a very short amount of time, and it would be a while before I make my next upgrade. In order to facilitate 64-bits and get the most out of this power, I have chosen Ubuntu Breezy Badger AMD64 for my operating system, and so far it has worked out quite well. I actually purchased the parts through a combination of NCIX and ATIC about two weeks ago, picked up the parts over last week, and assembled it all Friday night (Feb 10). Since then, I have been setting it up, and retrieving my files from Babbage (the computer I had been using at school up until now). Most applications work under 64-bit (as they have been compiled for 64 bit by the good people at Canonical). The only thing I need 32-bit environments for is video codecs from Windows and Macromedia Flash. Leave it to the closed source programs to prevent me from going 100% 64-bit.
Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of it on the web. I'll get those up when I move back into residence (I'm on spring break right now). I know I'm a little behind on breaking the news, and really behind on posting anything in my blog. I say it every time, but "hopefully I will update more frequently in the future". See you later!
