Grace Hopper

The moss in those machines, they caused the malfunction in the Harvard Mark II computer, and that was in 1947.

And her name was Grace Hopper.

Anybody that's listening, they can look that up and they can find that.

But she is the one that popularized the term debugging.

So I had to find that middle zone when I was creating any of my workshops.

And I've presented workshops for hundreds of people at conferences like Grace Hopper and Ship and Tapia for anyone who is in the tech space.

But then I started working with my daughter because she wanted to learn how to do things like sell things online.

So she actually... sold enough of her toys by using Facebook marketplace and making AI act as a marketing expert and create all of her ads that she bought a bed for herself.

Yes.

Grace Hopper being the obvious choice.

And there were women who were adjacent to the folks you interviewed.

Heidi Rosen was a developer and co-founder with her brother, Peter Rosen.

the only woman in the room.

So it was quite a different world.

That's not a reason not to include people like Grace Hopper.

Honestly, Grace Hopper and those guys were like, One, they worked on mainframes, so our filter was more we wanted people that were involved with personal computing.

Maybe it was a specific person, a pair, to sort of illustrate kind of the different ways that people would expand.

Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper are two women in science in the study.

Both were women in science in the first half of the 20th century.

Both ended up in frame by kind of a random event.

And she spent the rest of her life from age 20 to 90 doing nothing except solving genetics puzzles with a focus on the control of genes and transpositional genetic elements when she discovered that.

Very narrow, and she just stayed with that and just kept doing new experiments right literally until essentially the day she died.

Grace Hopper, who was a great pioneer in computer science, and Grace Hopper ran into that.

World War II comes along.

All right.

So there is a Navy admiral that gave this quote, uh, Grace, Admiral Grace Hopper, I want to say, something along those lines.

I could have butchered that.

That's all right.

And there was this absolutely brilliant lady who I had the pleasure of meeting.

Her name was Admiral Grace Hopper.

And she once said that, quote, a ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.

You know, and Rick did a piece last week, which if you haven't heard, you need to go find it on the workups to D-Day, you know, the training for D-Day.

So there was- Computers of every type.

There was men contributions from every corner of the world, but there was only Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace, and maybe one other person, one other woman in there.

And then even in the bookstore, there was nothing for girls and, uh, in computers, and there was only a couple of books about women in computing in, in their bookstore.

So [laughs] there was, uh, one book, Code Girls, which I had loved, by Liza Mundy, and there was only one copy there, so I, like, turned that book out so the, so the copy would at least show on the bookshelf.

Well, first I want to, uh, mention that when Do- Dottie was recog- she was one of the first women to be...

Probably she was one of the outstanding women in the federal workforce in computing.

She and Grace Hopper were contemporaries.

I found, uh, when I was doing my research, I found that both of their names were on as kind of founding members of the ACM in, uh, 1947.

And, um, w- encodings are these kind of durable capacities, kind of a ver- intrinsic construction, that lie within us, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life.

And, uh, and so to quickly grasp, uh, them, I'll take a, a, a couple of, of maybe one of, of the people in our study, it's a woman named Grace Hopper, and she was, uh, one of the early pioneers in computer science.

Uh, she worked on the first computer at, uh, the Mark I at, at Harvard in World War II, and, uh, and had this huge impact on the development of software.

But H- her life, if you go early in her life, she's a little girl, and, and she goes to this summer home, and, uh, she looks around in the summer home, and there are all these clocks.

And leaves these piles of clocks on the floor.

And, uh, to the great consternation of her mother.

But she, what that showed was Grace Hopper had this encoding for needing to figure out how gadgets work, and this impulse, this, "How can I make this gadget work better?" So when she stepped into, uh, through a series of kind of almost accidental events, it was truly a squiggly shift for her.

She was a professor of math.

There's matched pairs in the study.

There's a pair of women in science, uh, Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper.

Uh, and, uh, Barbara McClintock was a geneticist, and Grace Hopper was a computer scientist, both seminal in, uh, in their fields in the first half of the twentieth century.

And what's very interesting is you can see this thing that it's like a constellation of stars, and their life shifted in such a way that these encodings, these are durable capacities that reside within, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life.

And the, the experiences of life kinda move a window frame across that constellation, where all of a sudden, some of those encodings start to shine really brightly through the window.

If the window was over here, you might not see them.

So, uh, if you take, say, Grace Hopper in computer science, you know, she just had this encoding for figuring out gadgets.

This wonderful image of her as a, as a little girl going around their, like, summer house and, and finding all the clocks in all the rooms and taking them all apart, right, and creating piles of taken apart clocks 'cause she just, she just had to figure out how these gadgets worked.