Free printable SSAT practice test for Grade 9

In the 1940s, the few computers in existence were enormous, temperamental machines, and giving them instructions was a specialist's ordeal. Programs had to be written as long strings of numeric codes, each tied to the hardware of one particular machine, and a single misplaced digit could ruin hours of work. Grace Hopper, a mathematician who spent much of her career in uniform, became convinced that this arrangement had things backward. People, she argued, should not have to think like machines; machines should be made to understand something closer to the way people write.

Hopper was born in New York City in 1906. She studied mathematics and physics at Vassar College and earned a doctorate in mathematics from Yale in 1934, an unusual achievement for anyone at the time and a rare one for a woman. During World War II she joined the Navy Reserve and was assigned to Harvard University, where she became one of the first people to write instructions for the Mark I, an electromechanical calculator about fifty feet long that carried out calculations for the war effort.

Her name is often attached to a famous story from that period. In 1947, operators working on a later Harvard machine, the Mark II, traced a malfunction to a moth trapped in one of its relays. They taped the insect into the logbook with a note calling it the first actual case of a bug being found. Engineers had used "bug" to mean a defect long before then, so the moth did not invent the term, but Hopper enjoyed telling the story, and it helped make the word part of everyday computing language.

Her more lasting contribution came after the war, when she joined the company building the UNIVAC, one of the first commercial computers. There, in the early 1950s, she developed a program called A-0, which is widely regarded as one of the earliest compilers. A compiler is a program that translates instructions written in a more convenient form into the numeric code a machine actually runs. Many colleagues were skeptical. Computers, they insisted, could do arithmetic; they could not write programs. Hopper later recalled hearing that objection even after her compiler was already working.

She pressed further, arguing that business programs should be written in words resembling ordinary English. Her team's FLOW-MATIC language put that idea into practice, and it strongly influenced COBOL, a language designed in 1959 for business data processing. COBOL spread so widely that programs written in it still handle banking and government records today.

Hopper kept serving in the Navy for decades, retiring in 1986 as a rear admiral at the age of seventy-nine. In lectures she liked to hand out pieces of wire about a foot long, the distance light travels in a billionth of a second, to show audiences why every fraction of time mattered inside a computer. She died in 1992, and in 2016 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Every Saturday from June to September, Teo's grandfather set up a folding table at the end of the market row, between a man who sharpened knives and a woman whose goat cheese drew a line by eight o'clock. The table held thirty jars of honey arranged by color, from a pale gold that was almost white to a brown so dark it looked like coffee held up to a window.

Teo was fifteen, and he had agreed to help for one reason: his grandfather paid in cash. He had not counted on how visible the end of the row would be. Anyone walking from the parking lot to the bakery passed within six feet of him, and by the second week he had developed a habit of studying his phone whenever a group of teenagers drifted by.

His grandfather noticed, of course. He noticed everything about bees, and Teo suspected he had long ago stopped distinguishing between bees and grandsons. But he said nothing. He only talked, in his slow and steady way, to whoever stopped. He explained that the pale honey came from clover in early summer and the dark from buckwheat in August. He let children hold a jar up to the light. He told one woman that honey almost never spoils, and when she looked doubtful, he did not argue; he simply handed her a spoon.

Teo heard all of it whether he wanted to or not.

In late July, Dani Ortiz from his chemistry class stopped at the table with her older sister. Teo felt his face grow warm. He considered pretending to be a stranger who happened to be standing there.

"Why are they all different colors?" Dani's sister asked, pointing. "Is the dark one burnt or something?"

Teo's grandfather was bent over the cash box, counting change. He did not look up.

Teo heard himself answer. "It depends on the flowers," he said. "The bees go wherever things are blooming. Clover in June is light. Buckwheat later is dark, and it tastes almost like molasses." He paused, then picked up a spoon. "You can try it. People either love it or think it tastes like a barn."

The sister tried it and made a face, and Dani laughed and tried it and bought a jar. When they had gone, Teo realized he had not once reached for his phone.

His grandfather closed the cash box. "Barn," he said thoughtfully, as if testing the word. "That is not how I would describe it."

"It's how she would," Teo said.

The old man considered this, then nodded once, the way he nodded when a hive turned out to be healthier than he had feared. The next Saturday, without being asked, Teo arrived early and arranged the jars himself, from lightest to darkest.