Part I: Backward Clock, Forward Thinking: Admiral Grace Hopper
Written By: Roger Boodoo MD
"The most dangerous phrase is: We’ve always done it this way."
Grace Hopper hung a clock on her wall that ran backward. Not as a gag, but as doctrine - a daily reminder to question whatever “normal” is. Those counter-clockwise hands force you to do a double-take because we expect the opposite. Hopper lived in that pause, asking: If the default slows us down, what happens if we turn it the other way and build something better? How can we solve problems in new ways and innovate?
The Attack on Pearl Harbor: The Day Everything Changed
December 7, 1941. In a quiet office at Vassar, a 35-year-old Yale-trained Ph.D. and mathematics professor decided the classroom was too small for her calling of service and duty. At the time, the U.S. Navy did not allow women into the regular service. That changed when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the law creating WAVES, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, in 1942.
Hopper’s ambition met bureaucracy head-on. She was under the minimum weight and over the preferred age. She petitioned, secured waivers, and then proved why they mattered: proving everyone wrong and graduating first in her Midshipmen’s School class and becoming an Naval officer. Before she ever touched a Navy computer or revolutionized the Fleet systems, she had already broken three conventions: gender, rules, expectations. She was running on "Hopper time."
A Room of Gears and a 561-Page Promise: Transfer of Knowledge
In 1944, the Navy sent Hopper to Harvard’s Bureau of Ships Computation Project, an initiative that used one of the earliest computers, the Harvard Mark I, to perform military calculations. The room-sized machine ticked and clacked through wartime math. Hopper and a small team fed it problems the fleet needed solved immediately: rocket trajectories, gunnery tables, and minesweeper calculations - critical advantages for the U.S. Navy.
Then she did something radical, quietly: she co-authored a 561-page manual, titled "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator." It was the first comprehensive guide to computer programming and documented the operation of the Mark The next person wouldn’t have to start from zero - not just code but clarity in process. In a world that often celebrated lone genius, Hopper celebrated the transfer of knowledge: take what works, write it down, and hand it forward. That was the true essence of teamwork.
When a Real Bug Became a Software Bug: Diligence
In 1947, a failed mechanical switch halts the Mark II calculations. The team opens the panel of the giant computing machine and finds the culprit: a computer bug, literally a moth! They tape it into the lab log and annotate it as the first actual case of a bug being found. It’s funny and instructive.
When systems misbehave, don’t mystify but inspect. Open the panel. Look for the ordinary thing causing extraordinary trouble. It’s how airplanes keep flying and how good products continuously get better.
Depiction of a moth found in early computer continues on today as software bugs.
Teaching Machines to Speak People: Democratizing Computing
After World War II, Grace Hopper asked a question that sounds obvious now but was radical then: Why should people have to think like machines to use them?
Her solution was to build what we would now call a translator between human language and computer instructions.
In 1952, she created A-0, one of the first “compilers.” It turned English-like commands into the 1s and 0s a computer could run.
A few years later came FLOW-MATIC (1956): one of the first programming languages that actually looked like sentences.
That work fed into COBOL (1959), a language so accessible that allowed governments, banks, and businesses to finally write programs without needing to be electrical engineers.
In other words, Hopper helped democratize computing. She believed technology should serve the people who need it, not be locked away for a select group of specialists.
After retiring from the Navy in 1966, she was recalled to active duty just a year later to tackle a growing problem: the Navy’s computer systems spoke different languages and were not interoperable. Back in uniform, Hopper saw the bottleneck clearly. She made it her mission to push for standardization, so many machines could function seamlessly as one system.
She retired again in 1986 with the rank of Rear Admiral, making her one of the first women in U.S. Navy history to achieve flag officer rank. It was an extraordinary milestone in a Navy that, when she first joined, had not even allowed women to serve as line officers. Even then, at the height of her career, Hopper never stopped challenging inertia. She kept reminding people: “We’ve always done it this way” is just another way of saying we’ve stopped trying to improve.
Why this matters to us at HOPPR
We, HOPPR, carry Grace Hopper in our name and in our habits. Her standard is the one we work to meet every day:
Question the default. “We’ve always done it that way” isn’t cynicism; it’s care for the outcome.
Make hard things usable. Write the page you wish existed; leave the next person a faster path.
Treat debugging as learning. Tape the “moth” in the log; share the fix so no one trips twice.
Prefer standards over shortcuts. Work that travels is work that compounds.
Personal note: As a former U.S. Navy physician and Marine Corps battalion surgeon, I learned that clarity, checklists, and shared standards often feel like extra work until chaos hits. In those moments, when the environment is unfamiliar and decisions are critical, they’re the very things that save time (and lives).
Hopper’s way, and HOPPR’s way, is simple: document, simplify, standardize, and hand it forward.
