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

Kurt W. Beyer’s biography of Grace Hopper presents a lively, lucid narrative of the professional life of one of the most celebrated figures in the history of computing. Beyer, a former professor of information technology at the US Naval Academy who currently works in industry, situates Hopper’s contributions to the nascent field of programming as key to the development of the information age.

Beyer begins with Hopper’s early career as a professor of mathematics at an all-women’s college, leaving her early life mostly out of the frame. This starting point signals Beyer’s objective: he is exclusively concerned with Hopper’s professional development and accomplishments, and discussion of Hopper’s personal life rarely intrudes into the narrative.

His history gets underway in earnest with the outbreak of World War II and Hopper’s enlistment in the newly created Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services (WAVES) at age 37. Although her goal was to help the war effort by using her mathematical background for cryptographic work, Hopper was instead sent to Howard Aiken’s computer installation at Harvard. There she became the third programmer (and only woman) to work on Aiken’s IBM-built, Harvard-financed, and Navy-controlled Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, better known as the Mark I.

Although she received a frosty welcome—Aiken had not wanted a woman programmer—Hopper eventually flourished there. Learning how best to program the Mark I, an electromechanical behemoth with more than 750,000 moving parts (composed, in part, of unhelpfully high-resistance piano wire due to wartime shortages), was no easy feat. This difficult assignment gave Hopper both an intimate knowledge of the hardware and valuable coding experience. Beyer provides an excellent description of how these two, now distinct, skill sets went hand in hand during the early days of the Mark I’s operation. Also during this period, Hopper gained the respect and support of Aiken, a figure of growing influence in the evolving field, and forged other key professional friendships.

Beyer frequently alludes to, but leaves mostly unexplored, what he refers to as the “gender tensions” that Hopper faced (p. 40). The institutional sexism that made Hopper an exception in Aiken’s lab during the war also effectively ended her career in academic computing at the war’s end; the new department of engineering and applied physics, where Aiken’s lab found its home after it was released from the Navy’s control, offered no chance of promotion past the rank of research fellow for a woman. Beyer’s book only briefly touches on systemic discrimination, and its meanings and impacts are left under analyzed. This is a seeming paradox for a biography of a female pioneer whose name is synonymous with current efforts to combat institutionalized discrimination in computing.

Hopper’s subsequent job at John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert’s company, spun off from their work on the ENIAC, initially proved even more difficult. The fledgling company teetered on the verge of bankruptcy before being bought by Remington Rand. Although executives there failed to grasp computing’s full potential, Hopper’s years at Remington Rand (later Sperry Rand) were among the most fruitful of her career, from the creation of the compiler to the development of English-based computing languages that would form the basis for Cobol. Beyer argues that Hopper’s vision of more accessible, automated programming began to gain ground industry wide as a result of her collaborative style of innovation and her tireless efforts to sell computing’s potential to ever-wider audiences. Her work as head of the ACM’s Nomenclature Committee benefited from this approach, as she worked to cement a common professional language that would both reflect and support the field’s intellectual maturation.

Beyer argues that Hopper fostered a style of collaborative, feedback-reliant production that ultimately created better programming tools. He calls this collaborative process “distributed invention” (p. 22). His idea of “distributed biography,” however, fares less...