Beyer Kurt W. Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age

MIT Press, 2009. — 405 p. — (Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation). — ISBN 978-0262013109, 026201310X.The career of computer visionary Grace Murray Hopper, whose innovative work in programming laid the foundations for the user-friendliness of today's personal computers that sparked the information age.
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 computersSeries Foreword
Acknowledgements
The Myth of Amazing Grace
The Rebirth of Grace Murray Hopper
The Origins of Computer Programming
The Harvard Computation Laboratory
The Beginning of a Computing Community
The 1947 Harvard Symposium on Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machinery
Staring Into the Abyss
The Education of a Computer
IBM Answers Remington Rand's Challenge
The Development of Problem-Oriented Languages
Distributed Invention Matures: Grace Hopper and the Development of COBOL
Inventing the Information Age
Notes