Publication Date: February 10, 2012 | Series: Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation series
A Hollywood biopic about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper (1906--1992) 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 Inventionof theInformation Age, Kurt Beyer reveals a more authentic Hopper, a vibrant and complex woman whose career paralleled the meteoric trajectory of the postwar computer industry. Both rebellious and collaborative, Hopper 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.
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"I saw Grace Hopper speak when I was a young software programmer at Bell Labs. While she spoke of great technology and the power of computing, she also re-enforced the creative power of youthful thinking, public speaking, and collaborative efforts. Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age brings all of those themes together in a compelling way, placing Grace Hopper where she belongs: at the creative genesis of the technology upon which our world depends."--Lucy Sanders, CEO and Co-founder, National Center for Women and Information Technology
"It is a pleasure to finally read a biography of Grace Hopper that does not simply list the clichéd myths about 'Amazing Grace' but instead tells the story of her wonderful life and contributions to the development of programming languages. Beyer reveals interesting facts and aspects of her life that I have never seen published. It portrays Grace as a human being and subject to the whims of both personal and social problems of her era. Along the way it provides insight into the changing social status of technically oriented women and details the personal struggles that this caused Grace and her female colleagues."--Michael R. Williams, Professor Emeritus, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary
(Michael R. Williams )
"Beyer's meticulously researched biography shows how Hopper was one of the first to realise that software was the key to unlocking the power of the computer." -- The Guardian
"Bravo to Beyer for unearthing the fascinating, many-faceted history...of a phenomenal technology we take for granted and for portraying a woman of astonishing powers." Booklist
"It is a pleasure finally to read a biography of Grace Hopper that does not simply list the clichéd myths about 'Amazing Grace' but instead tells the story of her wonderful life and contributions to the development of programming languages. Beyer reveals interesting facts and aspects of her life that I have never seen published. It portrays Grace as a human being and subject to the whims of both personal and social problems of her era. Along the way it provides insight into the changing social status of technically oriented women and details the personal struggles that this caused Grace and her female colleagues." Michael R. Williams , Professor Emeritus, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary
About the Author
Kurt W. Beyer is a former professor at the United States Naval Academy and lectures regularly on the process of technological innovation. He is a cofounder of a digital media services company and has authored multiple patents (pending) on high speed digital data processing.
Product Details
Paperback: 408 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press; Reprint edition (February 10, 2012)
I first came across Admiral Grace Hopper when I was a teenager attending my sister's graduation from the College of William and Mary. Two things stand out about that experience. First, I remember this old, fragile looking woman sitting there, knitting, while the other college dignitaries spoke. Not everyday do you get to see an Admiral knit. But once she began speaking, I was struck by her confident, commanding voice, her humor, and her vision of the computing future. I guess I was used to my own grandmother constantly talking about the past...so it was striking to hear this older woman talking about a future that I couldn't even imagine at the time.
What made you decide to write about Grace Hopper and the first 30 years of the computer industry?
Grace Hopper influenced my own career choices, first as a naval officer, then as an academic, and finally as an entrepreneur. When I arrived at the United States Naval Academy on a hot day in July during the summer of 1986, Admiral Hopper had been influencing naval computer policy for twenty years. I was issued a personal computer, we had access to mil.net, the precursor to the internet. We emailed our professors, signed up for classes online, and our medical and dental records were digitized. The Academy's core curriculum was modified to incorporate computer use into many of our engineering and math classes, and Hopper herself came to speak to us lowly Plebes to encourage us to lead the computer revolution in and out of the navy.
By this time she was pretty legendary in the Navy, so I was shocked to arrive in Silicon Valley during the great dot.com boom of the 1990s and I found that few people my age knew who she was or what she had accomplished. As I pieced together the evolution of the computer industry for my PhD work at the University of California, Berkeley, I was actually surprised how influential the younger Hopper was during the first 30 years of the industry, so in the end my editors and I at MIT Press thought it best to tell the story of the early computer age through Hopper's career.
About Kurt Beyer
Kurt grew up in a blue-collar, immigrant family in Huntington, Long Island. Kurt's Dad Karl was a baker and his Mom Ann a nurse. Kurt was captain of the baseball and basketball teams at John Glenn High School, an accomplished trumpet player, and received his nomination to the U.S. Naval Academy from the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan. While at Annapolis Kurt played baseball and senior year was named Brigade Commander, in charge of the 4500 person brigade of midshipman. He graduated Annapolis in 1990 and was commissioned an officer in the United States Navy. Before attending flight school Kurt continued his education at the University of Oxford for two years. At Oxford, he completed a masters degree and rowed for Oxford where his crew competed in the finals of the Henley Royal Regatta in 1991. He also played on the University basketball team which won the British University Championship in 1992.
Following Oxford Kurt headed to Pensacola for Naval Flight School where he graduated first in his class. Kurt flew F-14 Tomcats and was assigned to a fighter squadron at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. Injury cut his naval career short, and Kurt was honorably discharged, receiving a Navy Commendation Medal and National Defense Service Medal. In 1997 Kurt moved to California to convalesce and complete a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. Kurt fully immersed himself in the Bay area dot.com revolution, co-founded a digital media start-up, and married a beautiful 4th generation San Franciscan.
The tragedy of September 11th changed Kurt's path and he returned to Annapolis as a civilian professor to help create the Naval Academy's new Information Technology major and lectured regularly on the process of technological innovation. He served on the Academy faculty 3 1/2 years and helped direct the international scholarships program. During this period the Naval Academy had the most British scholarship winners of any American University, including 8 Rhodes, 3 Marshall, and 4 Fitzgerald scholars. In January 2006 Kurt returned to the San Francisco Bay area to head up full time his digital media start-up and co-authored multiple patents (pending) on high speed digital data processing. Currently he advises start-ups and executives in Silicon Valley and lives in Mill Valley, Ca with his wife and two sons.
This book brought home to me the difference between history and biography. As a 50-year computer veteran (wrote my first program in 1959) I appreciated many of the firsts and trends that the author highlights. However, I got very little sense of Grace Hopper the person behind the technical and organizational achievements he celebrates. As an example, did she really just casually discard a marriage in order to enlist in the Navy? We're told she had a wonderful sense of humor but in the entire book there's only one example of an office prank she instigated. The author packs the last 20 years of her life into the last 25 pages of the book, and much of that was interspersed with retrospective material. Surely there was more to Cmdr Hopper's life in those years than her honors and awards, but we see none of it.
As history, however, the book misses one of Hopper's most important contributions -- the notion of an industry-wide standard. Hopper's work to convene the CODASYL group was the first of a long line of standards efforts (including ICANN and the rest of the Internet infrastructure) without which the Information Age would have withered for lack of cross-enterprise fertilization.
This is a great book. While it is from an `Academic' press, it is not at all pedantic or overbearing. In fact, it is a fascinating story of Grace Hopper and the amazing contribution that she and her team made to the development of computers. It also provides an insight into that development unlike any other. The fascinating aspect of this is that much of what we do today - from flow charting to debugging had to be invented and it was - by Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper. If you are at all interested in understanding the amazing tale of our computer development and the amazing impact that Grace Hopper had on that development, this is a must read!
What a fascinating woman. What a fascinating era. Kurt Beyer brings her story to life and explains much about the early days of computers and programming that most of us don't know and simply take for granted. Beyer blends history, technological information and human interest into this worthwhile read. Thank you.
