after graduating from radcliffe clapp began work at mit, the only woman among the early programmers of the whirlwind i, the first real-time computer. the whirlwind, a vacuum tube computer, had originally been commissioned by the united states navy but was subsequently financed by the air force for the semi-automatic ground environment (sage) project. clapp continued to work on the project after its transfer to the lincoln laboratory and later to the mitre corporation, eventually becoming a senior principal software systems engineer at mitre. after the sage project clapp continued to work in management at mitre and participated in the department of defense working group that led to the development of the ada programming language.