About this item
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 Invention of the Information 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.
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.
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