Google Doodle: Grace Hopper, a biography Hopper returned to Vassar to teach until she joined the US Navy reserve during World War two. She was assigned to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project at Harvard University where she was only the third person to program the Harvard Mark I computer. Hopper requested to transfer to the regular navy but her request was turned down because at aged 38 she was considered too old to serve. She continued to work at Harvard until 1949 when she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior programmer. There she helped to develop the UNIVAC I, which was the second commercial computer produced in the United States. In the 1950s the company was taken over by the Remington Rand corporation and Hopper created the first ever compiler. The compiler is a programme which takes source code written in one language and transforms it into another language. Hopper's first compiler was known as the A compiler and the first version was called the A-O. Her department soon released some of the first compiler-based programming languages Hopper's ideas soon lead to the development of COBOL, a universal computer programming language. It was Hopper's belief that programmes ought to be written as close to English as possible rather than in a machine code. Hopper continued to serve in the navy until 1986 when she was the oldest commissioned officer on active duty in the United States Navy. She died in Arlington, Virginia in 1992 at the age of 85