Âé¶¹´«Ã½

Review: Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age

By Liz Else

5 August 2009

IT WAS a world where women had little future, very much like the Madison Avenue evoked by the TV series Mad Men. This, however, was post-war computerland, where our heroine, , wrote the first specification for , one of the most successful programming languages.

Beyer has admirably cast Hopper as a serious player in a fledgling industry rather than as the subject of some trashy biopic: first female maths graduate from Yale becomes Vassar College professor, quits for navy after Pearl Harbor, divorces husband and ends up at the cutting edge of a computer revolution.

His version captures…

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