Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age

Author: Kurt W. Beyer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262517264
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Book Description
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 Invention of the Information 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 computers.

Grace Hopper

Author: Kathleen Broome Williams
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1612512658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
When Grace Hopper retired as a rear admiral from the U.S. Navy in 1986, she was the first woman restricted line officer to reach flag rank and, at the age of seventy-nine, the oldest serving officer in the Navy. A mathematician by training who became a computer scientist, the eccentric and outspoken Hopper helped propel the Navy into the computer age. She also was a superb publicist for the Navy, appearing frequently on radio and television and quoted regularly in newspapers and magazines. Yet in spite of all the attention she received, until now ""Amazing Grace,"" as she was called, has never been the subject of a full biography. Kathleen Broome Williams looks at Hopper's entire naval career, from the time she joined the WAVES and was sent in 1943 to work on the Mark I computer at Harvard, where she became one of the country's first computer programmers. Thanks to this early Navy introduction to computing, the author explains, Hopper had a distinguished civilian career in commercial computing after the war, gaining fame for her part in the creation of COBOL. The admiral's Navy days were far from over, however, and Williams tells how Hopper--already past retirement age--was recalled to active duty at the Pentagon in 1967 to standardize computer-programming languages for Navy computers. Her temporary appointment lasted for nineteen years while she standardized COBOL for the entire department of defense. Based on extensive interviews with colleagues and family and on archival material never before examined, this biography not only illuminates Hopper's pioneering accomplishments in a field that came to be dominated by men, but provides a fascinating overview of computing from its beginnings in World War II to the late 1980s.

Grace Hopper

Author: Laurie Wallmark
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
ISBN: 1454941529
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 47

Book Description
“If you’ve got a good idea, and you know it’s going to work, go ahead and do it.” The inspiring story of Grace Hopper—the boundary-breaking woman who revolutionized computer science—is told told in an engaging picture book biography. Who was Grace Hopper? A software tester, workplace jester, cherished mentor, ace inventor, avid reader, naval leader—AND rule breaker, chance taker, and troublemaker. Acclaimed picture book author Laurie Wallmark (Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine) once again tells the riveting story of a trailblazing woman. Grace Hopper coined the term “computer bug” and taught computers to “speak English.” Throughout her life, Hopper succeeded in doing what no one had ever done before. Delighting in difficult ideas and in defying expectations, the insatiably curious Hopper truly was “Amazing Grace” . . . and a role model for science- and math-minded girls and boys. With a wealth of witty quotes, and richly detailed illustrations, this book brings Hopper's incredible accomplishments to life.

Broad Band

Author: Claire L. Evans
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735211760
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
If you loved Hidden Figures or The Rise of the Rocket Girls, you'll love Claire Evans' breakthrough book on the women who brought you the internet--written out of history, until now. "This is a radically important, timely work," says Miranda July, filmmaker and author of The First Bad Man. The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers--but from Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the Victorian Age, to the cyberpunk Web designers of the 1990s, female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation. In fact, women turn up at the very beginning of every important wave in technology. They may have been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize, but they have always been part of the story. VICE reporter and YACHT lead singer Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her insightful social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the internet what it is today. Seek inspiration from Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II. Meet Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first-ever social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s. Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs. This inspiring call to action shines a light on the bright minds whom history forgot, and shows us how they will continue to shape our world in ways we can no longer ignore. Welcome to the Broad Band. You're next.

Dark Hero of the Information Age

Author: Flo Conway
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780465013715
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Book Description
Two award-winning journalists reveal the epic story of one of the 20th century's most brilliant figures--the eccentric mathematical genius Norbert Wiener, who founded the revolutionary science of cybernetics and then spent his life warning the world about its dangerous human consequences. photos.

Grace Hopper

Author: Xina M. Uhl
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 1725340461
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Book Description
Nicknames like the "Mother of Modern Naval Computing" and "Grandma COBOL" described the impact mathematical genius Grace Hopper had on the computer's development. In 1942, the first electronic computer filled an entire room. One simple calculation took hours to finish. As the first woman to program the United States' first computer, Hopper earned herself another nickname, "Amazing Grace." With fascinating details and period photographs, this fascinating biography covers the life and many achievements of a woman scientist without whom the development of modern computers would be impossible.

Grace Hopper

Author: Patricia J. Murphy
Publisher: Enslow Elementary
ISBN: 9780766022737
Category : Admirals
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A brief biography of the woman who pioneered advances in computer technology.

The Innovators

Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476708703
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Book Description
Chronicles the lives and careers of the men and women responsible for the creation of the digital age, including Doug Englebart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and more.

Human Computation

Author: Edith Law
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers
ISBN: 1608455165
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Book Description
Human computation is a new and evolving research area that centers around harnessing human intelligence to solve computational problems that are beyond the scope of existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. With the growth of the Web, human computation systems can now leverage the abilities of an unprecedented number of people via the Web to perform complex computation. There are various genres of human computation applications that exist today. Games with a purpose (e.g., the ESP Game) specifically target online gamers who generate useful data (e.g., image tags) while playing an enjoyable game. Crowdsourcing marketplaces (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) are human computation systems that coordinate workers to perform tasks in exchange for monetary rewards. In identity verification tasks, users perform computation in order to gain access to some online content; an example is reCAPTCHA, which leverages millions of users who solve CAPTCHAs every day to correct words in books that optical character recognition (OCR) programs fail to recognize with certainty. This book is aimed at achieving four goals: (1) defining human computation as a research area; (2) providing a comprehensive review of existing work; (3) drawing connections to a wide variety of disciplines, including AI, Machine Learning, HCI, Mechanism/Market Design and Psychology, and capturing their unique perspectives on the core research questions in human computation; and (4) suggesting promising research directions for the future. Table of Contents: Introduction / Human Computation Algorithms / Aggregating Outputs / Task Routing / Understanding Workers and Requesters / The Art of Asking Questions / The Future of Human Computation

Rocket Girl

Author: George D. Morgan
Publisher:
ISBN: 1616147393
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
Combining personal history with dramatic historical events, this extraordinary true story of America's first female rocket scientist shows how her talent for chemistry proved essential for America's early space program.