Indeed, Howard Aiken may well have been the first person to realize that programming would eventually become a profession in its own right. Not only would he later convince Harvard to start the first master's degree courses in what would now be called computer science, but he insisted from the beginning that the Mark I project be staffed with trained mathematicians—among them, most notably, a thirty-seven-year-old naval reserve lieutenant named Grace Murray Hopper, formerly a mathematics professor at Vassar College. ("Where the hell have you been?" was Aiken's greeting to her on the day she
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