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GRACE HOPPER AND THE INVENTION OF THE INFORMATION AGE
About The Author
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Dr. Kurt Beyer's Bio (Click Here)
Did you ever meet Grace Hopper?
I first came across Admiral Grace Hopper when I was a teenager attending my sister’s graduation from the College of William and Mary. Two things stand out about that experience. First, I remember this old, fragile looking woman sitting there, knitting, while the other college dignitaries spoke. Not everyday do you get to see an Admiral knit. But once she began speaking, I was struck by her confident, commanding voice, her humor, and her vision of the computing future. I guess I was used to my own grandmother constantly talking about the past…so it was striking to hear this older woman talking about a future that I couldn’t even imagine at the time.
What made you decide to write about Grace Hopper and the first 30 years of the computer industry?
Grace Hopper influenced my own career choices, first as a naval officer, then as an academic, and finally as an entrepreneur. When I arrived at the United States Naval Academy on a hot day in July during the summer of 1986, Admiral Hopper had been influencing naval computer policy for twenty years. I was issued a personal computer, we had access to mil.net, the precursor to the internet. We emailed our professors, signed up for classes online, and our medical and dental records were digitized. The Academy’s core curriculum was modified to incorporate computer use into many of our engineering and math classes, and Hopper herself came to speak to us lowly Plebes to encourage us to lead the computer revolution in and out of the navy.
By this time she was pretty legendary in the Navy, so I was shocked to arrive in Silicon Valley during the great dot.com boom of the 1990s and I found that few people my age knew who she was or what she had accomplished. As I pieced together the evolution of the computer industry for my PhD work at the University of California, Berkeley, I was actually surprised how influential the younger Hopper was during the first 30 years of the industry, so in the end my editors and I at MIT Press thought it best to tell the story of the early computer age through Hopper’s career.
Kurt grew up in a blue-collar,
immigrant family in Huntington, Long Island. Kurt’s Dad Karl was a baker and his Mom Ann a nurse. Kurt
was captain of the baseball and basketball teams at John Glenn High School, an accomplished trumpet player, and received his
nomination to the U.S. Naval Academy from the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan.
While at Annapolis Kurt played baseball and senior year was named Brigade Commander, in charge of the 4500 person brigade
of midshipman. He graduated Annapolis in 1990 and was commissioned an officer in the United States Navy.
Before attending flight school Kurt continued his education at the University of Oxford for two years. At Oxford, he completed
a masters degree and rowed for Oxford where his crew competed in the finals of the Henley Royal Regatta in 1991.
He also played on the University basketball team which won the British University Championship in 1992.
Following
Oxford Kurt headed to Pensacola for Naval Flight School where he graduated first in his class. Kurt flew
F-14 Tomcats and was assigned to a fighter squadron at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. Injury
cut his naval career short, and Kurt was honorably discharged, receiving a Navy Commendation Medal and National Defense Service
Medal. In 1997 Kurt moved to California to convalesce and complete a PhD at the University of California,
Berkeley. Kurt fully immersed himself in the Bay area dot.com revolution, co-founded a digital media start-up,
and married a beautiful 4th generation San Franciscan.
The tragedy of September 11th changed Kurt’s path and he returned to Annapolis as a civilian professor to help create the Naval Academy’s new Information Technology major and lectured regularly on the process of technological innovation. He served on the Academy faculty 3 1/2 years and helped direct the international scholarships program. During this period the Naval Academy had the most British scholarship winners of any American University, including 8 Rhodes, 3 Marshall, and 4 Fitzgerald scholars. In January 2006 Kurt returned to the San Francisco Bay area to head up full time a digital media start-up and co-authored multiple patents (pending) on high speed digital data processing. Currently Kurt works for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and advises start-ups and executives in Silicon Valley. He lives in Mill Valley, Ca with his wife Johanna and two sons Charlie and Gus.
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Author Kurt Beyer Interviewed by Smithsonian The Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation interviewed author Kurt Beyer about
the career of Grace Hopper, the history of the computer industry, the process of innovation, and the nature of invention.
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