Grace Hopper Documentary Released Today

A long time ago in a data center far, far away, the word "computer" was a job title. For a person. One of those people was Grace Hopper.

Grace, h@xing on a sweet laptop in the 40's

Grace worked her way up to Rear Admiral in the US Navy; no small feat for a woman of any time, but even more amazing as she started her career in the 30's with a PhD in math from Yale.

In the Navy, she would go on to work on the Harvard Mark 1 (the first modern computer), and she headed the team that wrote the first compiler. Her contributions to computer science are immense. They are also largely glossed over by a science and an industry that is, let's face it, a bit of a sausage fest.

It wasn't always that way. When computers were people, the industry was dominated by women, who tended to have better typing skills than men, and were cheaper to hire. Their contributions to the industry have been forgotten for decades, but thankfully there is a bit of a renaissance in uncovering the contribution of women to the history of computing (and cyptography).

Today's documentary is called The Queen of Code and is directed by Gillian Jacobs. You can read a bit more about the film on re/code, as well.

You can check out this Youtube video of Grace on Letterman in the mean-time: