Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age

Posted on November 14, 2009

Here is an interview we did with our friend author Kurt Beyer, who has just published “Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age” (MIT Press www.admiralgracehopper.com). It is the story of a woman who broke the glass ceiling in the 1940s as second in charge of the room-sized top secret computer at Harvard that designed the atom bomb while establishing the notion that computers weren’t single-purpose devices for calculating weapons trajectories, but could be taught languages to do everything from accounting to predicting election returns. She proved the latter at Remington Rand in the 50s when UNIVAC predicted the 1952 presidential election. Hopper retired, then returned to the Navy and became a minor celebrity in the 1980s after appearances on 60 Minutes and the David Letterman Show as the cranky/brilliant world’s oldest Admiral.