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Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation series) Paperback – February 10, 2012
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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.
- Print length404 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMIT Press
- Publication dateFebruary 10, 2012
- Dimensions5.38 x 1.01 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100262517264
- ISBN-13978-0262517263
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Editorial Reviews
Review
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—Review
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 CalgaryAbout the Author
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Product details
- Publisher : MIT Press; Reprint edition (February 10, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 404 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0262517264
- ISBN-13 : 978-0262517263
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.38 x 1.01 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #659,487 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #217 in Computer & Technology Biographies
- #240 in Computing Industry History
- #8,900 in Women's Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Did you ever meet Grace Hopper?
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
Dr. Kurt Beyer is a member of UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School and Graduate School of Information Science faculties, where he teachings the entrepreneurship program to MBAs, undergrads, and grad students. The program produces multiple promising startups each year including recent successes Indiegogo, Tubemogul, Magoosh, Mobileworks, Traveling Spoon, Plushcare, Noglo, Socialwire, and Vires Aerospace. Former students hold prominent positions at successful startups Uber, Pinterest, Postmates, Clever, Elance, LiveRamp, Kenshoo, and Education Elements. Kurt also serves as a partner at Parallel Advisors where is advises executives at recent IPO startups Yelp and Marin Software in addition to many successful earlier stage companies.
Prior to joining Berkeley and Parallel Advisors Kurt was a faculty member at the United States Naval Academy and founder of Riptopia Digital Media where he served as CEO for 6 years. During the 1990s 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.
Kurt is the author of Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, published by MIT Press in 2010, which highlights the rise of the computer industry through the amazing career of Grace Hopper, the woman responsible for the development of computer programming. The book was in the Top 10 Science/Technology books for 2010/2011.
Kurt earned his BS in engineering and history from the U.S. Naval Academy where he served as Brigade Commander senior year. He received an MA in economics and philosophy from Oxford University, and a PhD in the history of science and technology and economic history from UC Berkeley. Born and raised by an immigrant working class family on Long Island, Kurt now makes his home in Marin County with his wife Johanna and two sons Charlie and Gus.
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Give this book to anyone interested specifically in the materials covered but also to those with a tendency to whine rather than rolling up their sleeves and getting the job done (any job). Grace Hopper was the essence of grit and that grit is well described here.
But reading this book put the meat on the bones of achievements that boggle my mind:
- invented the subroutine
- invented the compiler
- one of only 400 Americans awarded a doctorate in mathematics between 1930-1934
- one of the first women to receive a mathematics degree from Yale
- joined the first computer start-up ever - EVER!
- invented COBOL which nearly 80% of all code was written in by 2000 (which I both studied and taught)
- reached the rank of Rear Admiral in the USNavy and retired at 86 as the oldest active officer in the navy
- Was a founder of the Association for Computing Machinery (which I have been a member of for >30 years)
Little did I truly, truly understand the impact of Grace Hopper until I read this book. What a life and what a contribution.
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.
The last chapter (11) is actually a nice summary of the the things that were unique about Grace. It would have made a great intro for to a detailed bio.
It would have been a two-star book, but there were so many typos--bad typos, about 100 or so--that caused me to re-read or be confused that I had to go with one star. (For example, I noted two instances of "Grace FLopper", a photo caption randomly in the middle of a paragraph, and a sentence missing its last few words.)
I was trained on UNIVAC computers in 1962. Eventually, spent 21 years of my life programming computers. Got a chance to chat with Grace Hopper a couple of times in her Pentagon office back in 1970.
This book does a masterful job of telling how it all came about especially from the perspective of someone who's done a lot of programming.
When I got involved with UNIVAC computers in 1962, the invention of the basics of the digital computer and high order programming languages were essentially complete. I found it fascinating to read about the early machines and the struggle by the programmers to communicate with them and to get the results they needed. The technical descriptions of the machines involved don't tell me as much about what's really going on as the descriptions of the early efforts to program them.
A great read. A much needed combination of biography and history.
Top reviews from other countries
The story of the development of software from machine code to what we would recognise as a high level English-like coding system is well told. Beyer spends time describing the intellectual development of Hopper and her team. One key turning point was the realisation that high-level code frees the programmer from being tied to one type of computer. Hopper realised the need for the compiler and the subroutine library. She was a key actor in seeing the potential of computers for business and that a better, and less technical, interface was needed.
Now the criticisms. Beyer really has taken the idea of iteration to heart. He repeats things irritatingly. He tells us over and over again that Hopper wrote 'A Manual of Operation...'. There are other examples of repeated descriptions of events and ideas.
The book is very confusingly structured. Beyer jumps backward and forward in time in a very cavalier manner. I don't think that this was necessary, as most of the events fit neatly on a timeline and could have been presented linearly. This would have highlighted the developmental threads much more clearly. I think that this book was a concatenation of several separate accounts and was not subject to sufficiently critical reading and editing. That would account for the repetition and structural weakness.
If the author had avoided repetition and had used a better structure, the work would have been perhaps two thirds the length. It would also have been more readable. Another piece of padding was the philosophical discussion about the nature of historical description and the detailing of sources. I ploughed through it through sheer will-power. I don't think it adds to the book and its story.
This book has the feel of a PhD thesis that was expanded. If so it was a good idea. However it would have been better either to publish only the essential text or to add further chapters on how Hopper's idea and innovations continued and affected subsequent history. The period from 1967 to 1992 was covered in a mere two pages.
Criticism apart, for anyone interested in computing, this is a fascinating book.
In many ways, she is a textbook case of someone who was in the right place at the right time. As a young woman, Hopper benefited from a passing fashion amongst wealthy East Coast families for giving their daughters a college education. A talented mathematician, Hopper began her career as an academic and teacher. Following America's entry to the War in 1941, Hopper quickly found herself working on the Navy's "Computational Project" using something that would eventually be called a "computer" (in the 1940's "computer" referred to a person rather than a machine). The rest as they say is history.
Hopper's vision for computing in the post-War world was as a tool for transforming business, rather than just solving mathematical problems for universities or the military. Moving between big business, defence(the Pentagon was a major financier of early computing) and academia, Hopper got people, including business rivals, to work together to establish a common infrastructure for the future of computing. COBOL, the first business orientated programming language and the Open Source movement are among the most well known products of this collaborative approach.
Although nominally a biography, this book is (as the subtitle suggests) very much about the creation of the information age. Beyer's argument is that successful inventions are about more than brilliant individuals: they need groups of people to adopt new ideas and make them work. Hopper's genius lay as much in being a gifted communicator and facilitator as in being the begetter of original ideas.
Whilst not overly technical, this book assumes an understanding of basic IT concepts such as compilers and subroutines and is most likely to interest readers with some connection to the world of computing.
It should also interest anyone concerned about the role of women in the workplace. Computing's wartime roots meant that the earliest programmers were almost exclusively female and Hopper consciously promoted the concept of a new profession that was free of traditional gender stereotyping. This was one vision that was not realised. The proportion of women in computing has shown a steady decline over the last twenty years and the trend seems set to continue.









