Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (review)

Kurt Beyer is an information scientist with a Ph.D. from Berkeley. He taught at the U.S. Naval Academy before founding his own digital service company. His expertise is evident in a book that primarily offers a fine survey of computer invention and development from 1945 to 1960, with particular attention to the part played by Grace Hopper. But Beyer has a secondary goal that leads him into treacherous waters. He feels that Hopper has received a good deal more credit than she deserves, has in fact become the subject of myth, shrouded in “layers of rhetoric” that depict “her as a heroic pioneer who was single-handedly responsible for the invention of computer programming” (p. 2). Beyer easily knocks down the straw man he set up. I know of no one who credits Hopper with accomplishing anything single-handedly. She was always, and proudly, the member of a team, though often the lead member. Beyer’s eagerness to cut Hopper down to size leads him to some rhetorical flourishes of his own. He insists that Hopper was largely unknown until March 1983, when television’s 60 Minutes featured an interview with her. This seems a remarkable claim to make about someone named fourteen years earlier by the Data Processing Management Association “Computing Sciences Man of the Year” (as Beyer himself later notes [p. 322]).

Grace Hopper grew up in New York. After graduating with honors in mathematics from Vassar in 1928, she completed a Ph.D. in math at Yale in 1934. The now well-established myth that she was the first female math Ph.D. at Yale (which Beyer may have originated [p. 25]) does an injustice to an institution that had long fostered female scholarship. Hopper was in fact the eleventh woman to receive a math doctorate from Yale; the first was in 1895. World War II marked a turning point for Hopper, as it did for so many others. She enlisted in the U.S. Navy and became a first lieutenant in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). The navy assigned her to work on the Mark I computer at Harvard, where she remained throughout the war. She continued after the war as a Harvard fellow, working on the Mark II and Mark III computers. In 1949 she moved to Philadelphia to work with colleagues at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Between 1945 and 1960, Hopper published a series of seminal papers on programming and computer design. Her contributions spanned a wide area, but especially significant was her work with teams that developed computer language compilers for machine-readable programming languages that used words rather than number and symbols. The primary computer programming language of the following decades, COBOL, is largely and accurately credited to Grace Hopper. Future computers, the ones that allowed the interaction we experience today, evolved from the languages she played so significant a role in developing.

This decade-and-a-half is the focus of Beyer’s study. He relies heavily on oral history to flesh out the archival records. Although the book includes no bibliography, it does have fifty-two pages of endnotes and the first chapter discusses the sources at some length. The book is not a biography, nor was it intended to be. Only three of twelve chapters are explicitly biographical. As Beyer acknowledges, Katherine Broome Williams’s Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (2004), reviewed in T&C in April 2006, largely freed him from attending to the details of Hopper’s life (pp. 329–30). This makes his choices with regard to Hopper’s career especially disturbing. His opening reference to “the petite, heavily wrinkled computer programmer proudly wearing her navy uniform in the twilight of her career” (p. 1) seems insultingly patronizing to so accomplished a woman. Even less savory is Beyer’s sensationalized and unattributed account of Hopper’s arrest for drunkenness and disorderly conduct (p. 175). The jarring incongruence of...