Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age -- Author Kurt W. Beyer in Conversation with Northern California Public Broadcasting’s Linda O’Bryon
Computer History Museum
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Thursday, March 4, 2010, 12:00pm
According to Beyer, Grace Hopper is arguably as important a figure to computing as Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs, and serves as a responsible, civic-oriented role model for current and future technical and business leaders.
A Hollywood movie 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 goes beyond the screen play-ready myth to reveal a more authentic Hopper, a vibrant and complex woman whose career paralleled the meteoric trajectory of the postwar computer industry, and discusses the indelible contribution she made to the nascent computer industry.
