A Hollywood biopic about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper (19061992) would go like this: a young professor abandons the ivy-covered walls of academia to serve her country in the Navy after Pearl Harbor and finds herself on the front lines of the computer revolution. She works hard to succeed in the all-male computer industry, is almost brought down by personal problems but survives them, and ends her career as a celebrated elder stateswoman of computing, a heroine to thousands, hailed as the inventor of computer programming. Throughout Hopper's later years, the popular media told this simplified version of her life story. In Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, Kurt Beyer goes beyond the screenplay-ready myth to reveal a more authentic Hopper, a vibrant and complex woman whose career paralleled the meteoric trajectory of the postwar computer industry. Hopper made herself "one of the boys" in Howard Aiken's wartime Computation Laboratory at Harvard, then moved on to the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corporation. Both rebellious and collaborative, she was influential in male-dominated military and business organizations at a time when women were encouraged to devote themselves to housework and childbearing. Hopper's greatest technical achievement was to create the tools that would allow humans to communicate with computers in terms other than ones and zeroes. This advance influenced all future programming and software design and laid the foundation for the development of user-friendly personal computers. Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation series
Cited By
- Cobb M (2023). The Representation of Knowledge and the Relevance of Biological Models at the Symposium on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, 1958, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 45:3, (32-47), Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023.
- Pears A, Tedre M, Valtonen T and Vartiainen H What Makes Computational Thinking so Troublesome? 2021 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), (1-7)
- Vogel W (2017). "The Spitting Image of a Woman Programmer": Changing Portrayals of Women in the American Computing Industry, 1958-1985, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 39:2, (49-64), Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017.
- Spicer D (2017). CHM Happenings, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 39:2, (89-90), Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017.
- Grudin J and Williams G (2013). Two women who pioneered user-centered design, Interactions, 20:6, (15-20), Online publication date: 1-Nov-2013.
- Haigh T (2011). The history of information technology, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 45:1, (431-487), Online publication date: 1-Jan-2011.
Index Terms
- Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age
Recommendations
Hopper, Grace Murray
Encyclopedia of Computer ScienceGrace Brewster Murray Hopper (Fig. 1) was born in New York City on 9 December 1906. She received her B.A. in Mathematics and Physics from Vassar College in 1928, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She continued her graduate studies in mathematics ...
Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) interview: July 1968
Computer Oral History CollectionGrace Murray Hopper was born on December 9, 1906 in New York, New York. She graduated from the Hartridge School, Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1924. She attended Vassar College and earned a BA in 1928. Hopper continued her studies at Yale University where ...