Margaret Helen Harper

Margaret Helen Harper (9 February 1919 - 13 October 2014) was an American computer programmer who worked with Grace Hopper at Remington Rand to develop one of the first computer compilers. Harper was born in Michigan, but lived most of her life in Pennsylvania. She worked as a programmer and then as a professor. Margaret was encouraged in her studies as a child, but she lamented that she wasn't very artistic. Margaret graduated in 1940 with a Bachelor of Science from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Education where she studied chemistry.

Career

It is not clear how Harper got involved in computer science, but by the 1950s she was working as a developer. Hopper even stated that "this work is necessarily group research, and this account cannot be published without citing those members…primarily responsible for the achievement of these results". In her article, Harper starts off by saying how the 1950s computer programmer has essentially been like a "settler in America" who must make every bit of his house by hand, right down to the pegs that hold the house together!

After Harper finished work with Hopper and Ridgway at Remington Rand, she continued as a programming analyst at Auerbach Corporation in the 1960s. She was among those listed in the Who's Who in the Computer Field for 1963-64 and the Who's Who in Computers and Data Processing for 1971. After working for Auerbach, she taught at the university of a Pennsylvania and later retired.

She died in 2014 in Pennsylvania at the age of 95.