At the height of World War II, a Vassar mathematics professor joined the Navy and stepped into a secret laboratory at Harvard to program one of the world's first computers. She was told to think in binary; instead, she chose to teach the machine to speak English.
This is the definitive story of Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, the "Grand Old Lady of Software" and a Rear Admiral who defied every convention of her time. From her childhood spent dismantling alarm clocks to her role in the creation of COBOL and the first compiler, Hopper's vision bridged the gap between human thought and machine logic.
She was a "pirate" in dress blues who famously coined the term "computer bug" and carried "nanoseconds" in her pocket. In a male-dominated world of brass and silicon, she didn't just break the glass ceiling-she rewrote the code of the Information Age.
Spanning nearly a century of radical technological and cultural change, this biography explores the life of a woman who was as comfortable in the Pentagon as she was on the stage of late-night television. It is an inspiring journey of a visionary who proved that the most dangerous phrase in any language is: "We've always done it this way." Approx.155 pages, 33700 word count