“when the computer wore a skirt”: Jim Hodges, “She Was a Computer When Computers Wore Skirts,” 2008, www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_kjohnson.html.
CHAPTER TWO: AMAZING GRACE
As Grace began her graduate studies: From which she was only the eleventh woman to receive a PhD in mathematics.
Her intellectual ambidexterity was legendary: Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004), 12.
It was a nice vacation from the breakneck: Williams, Grace Hopper, 16.
“one jump ahead of the students”: Grace Murray Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, July 1968, Computer Oral History Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 16, http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/AC0196.pdf.
it was a “gorgeous year”: Ibid., 28.
“I was beginning to feel pretty isolated”: Ibid., 25.
“We usually ended up going through together”: Ibid.
“I just reveled in it”: Ibid., 26.
“Where have you been?”: Ibid., 29.
Everyone at Harvard called it the Mark I computer: Kurt W. Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 37.
“That is a computing engine”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1968, 29.
The positions of holes: Grace became so accustomed to eight-bit coding that she’d sometimes accidentally balance her checkbooks in octal.
“this gray-haired old schoolteacher”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1968, 29.
“And then he gave me a week”: Ibid.
Years later, when Grace was an established figure: Beyer, Grace Hopper, 314.
“It was fascinating,” she said, a “hotbed of ideas”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1968, 31.
“bawling out” the perpetrator: Aiken’s reputation was so widely known that even a laudatory article about his retirement in the April 1962 issue of Communications of the ACM, a trade journal for the field he helped pioneer, described him as “strong-willed, independent, single-minded and insistent on the highest standards of scholarly integrity, performance, and achievement” and “a ruthless taskmaster.”
“He’s wired a certain way”: Grace Murray Hopper, interview by Beth Luebbert and Henry Tropp, July 1972, Computer Oral History Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 29, http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/AC0196.pdf.
And anyway, as Grace told Howard Aiken: Ibid., 47.
“pull her mirror out of her pocketbook”: Howard Aiken, interview by Henry Tropp and I. B. Cohen, February 1973, Computer Oral History Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 44, http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/AC0196.pdf.
“Grace was a good man”: Ibid.
“Bug” is engineering slang: Fred R. Shapiro, “Etymology of the Computer Bug: History and Folklore,” American Speech 62, no. 4 (1987): 376–78.
“gremlin that had a nose”: Hopper, interview by Luebbert and Tropp, 1972, 27.
After the moth incident: Grace Murray Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, January 1969, Computer Oral History Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 13, http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/AC0196.pdf.
“ninety-nine percent of the time”: Ibid., 10.
Back before the war: Williams, Grace Hopper, 13.
“The tremendous contrast”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1968, 4.
draftswomen, assemblers, secretaries, and technicians: Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestly, and Crispin Rope, ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 298.
“basically Angry Birds”: Mark Priestley and Thomas Haigh, Working on ENIAC: The Lost Labors of the Information Age, http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/working-on-eniac-lost-labors-information-age.
In their backbreaking calculations: John Mauchly, interview by Uta Merzbach, June 1973, Computer Oral History Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 22, http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/AC0196.pdf.
Dorothy’s ability to code: Jean Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer: Jean Jennings Bartik and the Computer That Changed the World (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2013), 9.
“more handicraft than science”: Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 15.
“We were perplexed and asked”: Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 13.
In its time at the Moore School: Haigh et al., ENIAC in Action, 96–97.
“like an automaton”: John Mauchly, interview by Henry Tropp, January 1973, Computer Oral History Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 70, http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/AC0196.pdf.
“It was just a great romance”: Ibid.
“I don’t want teaching”: Kay McNulty, quoted in W. Barkley Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 16.
It had forty panels: H. H. Goldstine and Adele Goldstine, “The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC),” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 10.
“little IBM maintenance man”: Jean J. Bartik and Frances E. “Betty” Snyder Holberton, interview by Henry Tropp, April 1973, Computer Oral History Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 19, http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/AC0196.pdf.
They found a sympathetic man: Ibid., 21.
“a little cavalier”: Mauchly, interview by Tropp, 1973, 66.
“How do you write down a program?”: Bartik and Holberton, interview by Tropp, 1973, 29.
Occasionally, the six of us programmers: Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC,” 1996, 1096.
“cross between an architect and a construction engineer”: The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers, directed by Kathy Kleiman (2016, Vimeo), VOD.
“It was a son of a bitch to program”: Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 84.
“Betty and I had a grand time”: Ibid., 84–85.
The pair worked around the clock: Ibid., 92.
Betty Jean kept a taste: Ibid., 95.
Betty could “do more logical reasoning”: Ibid., 85.
faster than a speeding bullet: Ibid., 25.
The Bettys and Kay McNulty hustled: Jean Jennings Bartik, “Oral History of Jean Bartik: Interviewed by Gardner Hendrie,” July 1, 2008, Computer History Museum, 31, www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories.
“The amount of work that had to be done”: Bartik and Holberton, interview by Tropp, April 1973, 55.
“the ENIAC was . . . told to solve”: T. R. Kennedy, “Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering,” New York Times, February 15, 1946.
“several weeks’ work” would never: Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 474.
“The press conference and follow-up”: Ibid.
“It felt like history had been made”: Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 85.
“boldface lie”: Bartik, interview by Gardner Hendrie, July 2008, 31.
“I wasn’t photogenic”: Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 37.
When the army used a War Department: Light, “When Computers Were Women,” 475.
genderless “group of experts”: Ibid., 473.
“If the ENIAC’s administrators had known”: Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 21.
“subprofessional, a kind of clerical work”: Jennifer S. Light, “Programming,” in Gender and Technology: A Reader, ed. Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenz
iel, and Arwen P. Mohun (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 295.
CHAPTER THREE: THE SALAD DAYS
He promptly remarried: Williams, Grace Hopper, 17.
“My time was up”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1969, 15.
If the computer didn’t run: Ibid.
But computers had a huge: Abbate, Recoding Gender, 42.
“I loved it,” she wrote: Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 140.
“The fact is,” Betty Snyder said: Frances E. “Betty” Holberton, interview by James Ross, April 1983, Charles Babbage Institute, Center for Information Processing, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 10, www.cbi.umn.edu/oh.
“a very delightful person”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1969, 3.
“We all accepted Pres”: Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 138–40.
A year into her employment: Ibid., 123.
“That’s how so many secretaries”: Captain Grace Hopper, “Oral History of Captain Grace Hopper: Interviewed by Angeline Pantages,” December 1980, Computer History Museum, 27, www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories.
But only EMCC had working machines: Beyer, Grace Hopper, 171.
“slipped into UNIVAC like duck soup”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1969, 10.
“if the programmer and the engineer”: Holberton, interview by Ross, 1983, 6–7.
“if anyone could do something”: Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 123.
“Now I had two-dimensional programs”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1969, 3.
“At that time the Establishment”: Grace Murray Hopper, “Keynote Address,” in History of Programming Languages, ed. Richard L. Wexelblat (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 9.
“When Remington Rand bought UNIVAC”: UNIVAC Conference, OH 200 (Oral history on May 17–18, 1990, Washington, DC, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, http://purl.umn.edu/104288).
“I mean, it was just as though”: UNIVAC Conference, 1990.
“thought these idiots down in Philadelphia”: Ibid.
“That was a disaster”: Holberton, interview by Ross, 1983, 14.
An excerpt from that oral history: UNIVAC Conference, 1990.
“There was no feeling”: Holberton, interview by Ross, 1983, 14.
“We are at a loss”: Beyer, Grace Hopper, 217–18.
“it sounded impressive enough to match”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1968, 8.
CHAPTER FOUR: TOWER OF BABEL
Not coming from any existing art: Jean Sammet, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 44–53.
“guarding skills and mysteries”: John Backus, “Programming in America in the 1950s: Some Personal Impressions,” in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, eds. N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 127.
The most basic programs specify: Abbate, Recoding Gender, 76.
“looking at a DNA molecule”: Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 290.
Ostensibly, a computer like the UNIVAC: Like many people in the 1950s, Grace uses “UNIVAC” to mean “computer.”
“the novelty of inventing programs”: Grace Hopper, “The Education of a Computer,” ACM ’52, Proceedings of the 1952 ACM National Meeting, Pittsburgh, 243–49.
“a well-grounded mathematical education”: Ibid.
running print advertisements: Abbate, Recoding Gender, 86.
“It was very stupid”: Hopper, interview with Pantages, 1980, 7.
Grace saw the proliferation: The biblical metaphor was used by Grace Hopper and stuck. Even the cover of Jean Sammet’s canonical Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals, the first major analysis of the field, features a winding tower inscribed with the names of a hundred different languages.
“time for a common business language”: R. W. Bemer, “A View of the History of COBOL,” Honeywell Computer Journal 5, no. 3 (1971): 131.
Every major computer manufacturer: In 1959, that meant IBM, Honeywell, RCA, General Electric, Burroughs, National Cash Register, Philco, Sylvania, International Computers and Tabulators, and Sperry Rand, the company that resulted from the merger of Remington Rand and Sperry Gyroscope.
The first would examine existing compilers: Ensmenger, The Computer Boys, 94.
“This language was going to be ‘it’”: Betty Holberton, “COBOL Session: Transcript of Discussant’s Remarks,” in History of Programming Languages, 262.
beyond Holberton and Mary Hawes: When Jean Sammet was a young programmer, she worked at the Sperry Gyroscope Company, a defense contractor. In 1955, Sperry bought out Remington Rand, forming Sperry Rand. Sammet would often take the night train to Philadelphia to run programs on UNIVAC computers before they were shipped, serving as a beta-tester in Grace Hopper’s programming division. She remained a great admirer of Grace throughout her career. Steve Lohr, Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists, and Iconoclasts—the Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 47.
Because programmers love acronyms: Ensmenger, The Computer Boys, 96.
Most programmers explicitly despise: Ibid., 100–101.
COBOL “cripples the mind”: To be fair, Dijkstra was a tough judge of programming languages. Of FORTRAN he wrote, “The sooner we can forget FORTRAN ever existed, the better, for as a vehicle of thought it is no longer accurate”; while PL/I, in his estimation “could turn out to be a fatal disease.” Edsger W. Dijkstra, Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982), 130.
COBOL: //Koh’Bol/, n: The New Hacker’s Dictionary, 3rd ed., comp. Eric S. Raymond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 115.
wrote this off as a “snob reaction”: Sammet, “COBOL Session,” 266.
“as much as any other single person”: Ibid., 4.
Moser would also help out: Denise Gürer, “Pioneering Women in Computer Science,” Communications of the ACM 38(1): 45–54, https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/readings/p175-gurer.pdf.
machine made from code alone: Abbate, Recoding Gender, 84.
“both the expertise to devise solutions”: Abbate, Recoding Gender, 81.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE COMPUTER GIRLS
“The Computer Girls,” the magazine reported: Lois Mandel, “The Computer Girls,” Cosmopolitan, 1967, 52–56.
“You have to plan ahead: Ibid.
“‘Of course we like having the girls around’”: Nathan Ensmenger, “Making Programming Masculine,” in Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing, ed. Thomas Misa (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010).
Some estimates peg female programmers: Ibid.
Many of these were dramatic: Abbate, Recoding Gender, 92.
“If one character, one pause”: Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 8.
Others have cited a personality clash: Ensmenger, The Computer Boys, 147.
This wage discrimination: Abbate, Recoding Gender, 90.
The introduction of formal: Ensmenger, The Computer Boys, 239.
“began as women’s work”: Ensmenger, “Making Programming Masculine.”
“brought with it unspoken ideas: Abbate, Recoding Gender, 103.
As she told a historian in 1968: Hopper, interview with Merzbach, 1968, 17.
“stereotypically feminine skills of communication”: Abbate, Recoding Gender, 109.
In the 1990s, when I finally: Plant, Zeroes + Ones, 33.
“When computers were vast systems”: Ibid., 37.
CHAPTER SIX: THE LONGEST CAVE
The first of these guides: Later generations of enslaved guides would sell these fish to to
urists to raise enough money to buy their own freedom.
“a bowl of spaghetti”: Roger W. Brucker, “Mapping of Mammoth Cave: How Cartography Fueled Discoveries, with Emphasis on Max Kaemper’s 1908 Map” (Mammoth Cave Research Symposia, Paper 4, October 9, 2008, http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/mc_reserch_symp/9th_Research_Symposium_2008/Day_one/4.)
One nameless noodle: Ibid.
“like chocolate frosting”: Richard D. Lyons, “A Link Is Found Between Two Major Cave Systems,” New York Times, December 2, 1972, www.nytimes.com/1972/12/02/archives/a-link-is-found-between-two-major-cave-systems-link-found-between-2.html?_r=0.
“in the open truck bed”: Patricia P. Crowther, Cleveland F. Pinnix, Richard B. Zopf, Thomas A. Brucker, P. Gary Eller, Stephen G. Wells, and John P. Wilcox, The Grand Kentucky Junction: A Memoir (St. Louis, MO: Cave Books, 1984), 96.
“It’s an incredible feeling”: Roger W. Brucker and Richard A. Watson, The Longest Cave (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 213.
Will ran a “map factory”: Ibid., 171.
“plotting commands on huge rolls”: Dennis G. Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original ‘Adventure’ in Code and in Kentucky,” Digital Humanities Quarterly (2007), www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html.
In 1969, BBN was contracted: James Gillies and Robert Caillau, How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15.
A lifelong mountaineer: Brucker and Watson, The Longest Cave, 171.
“I get cold when he’s not keeping me company”: Crowther et al., The Grand Kentucky Junction, 10.
They stayed up late: Ibid.,19–20.
“Now I can sleep”: Ibid., 20.
“The route is never in view”: Brucker and Watson, The Longest Cave, xvii.
no exploration without survey: Brucker, “Mapping of Mammoth Cave.”
“working rationally and systematically”: Joseph P. Freeman, Cave Research Foundation Personnel Manual, 2nd ed. (Cave City, KY: Cave Research Foundation, 1975).
“pulled apart in various ways”: Julian Dibbell, “A Marketable Wonder: Spelunking the American Imagination,” Topic Magazine 2, www.webdelsol.com/Topic/articles/02/dibbell.html.
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