Grace Murray Hopper - On Curiosity.

"I WAS BORN WITH CURIOSITY. I always claim that I had a strong resemblance to the elephant’s child in Kipling’s Just So Stories who pokes his nose into everybody’s business. Finally the alligator latches onto his nose and the elephant’s child is pulled away and his nose gets stretched. I remember when I was about seven, we had seven bedrooms up at our summer home for all the cousins to come visiting. Each room had an alarm clock, one of those round ones with two feet and a bell up on top that rings like crazy when the alarm goes off. When we were going on a trip, Mother would always go around at night and set all the alarm clocks. One night she went around to set them and they had all been taken apart. What had happened was that I’d taken the first one apart and I couldn’t get it together so I opened the next one. I ended up with all seven of them apart. After that I was restricted to one clock. It’s that kind of curiosity: How do things work?"

– Grace Murray Hopper, from 'Particular Passions, Talk with Women Who Shaped Our Times', By Lynn Gilbert.

The oral biography of Grace Murray Hopper, whose work with early computers transformed mathematical symbols into words, helping to usher in the era of technology.

This brief chapter is available for $0.99 on Amazon and Apple, one of 42 chapters that recounts the accomplishments, frustrations and passions of the great women of the 1920s-1970s.

Grace Murray Hopper – On Accomplishments

"I never thought about what I wanted to accomplish in life. I had too many things to do. I was so deeply involved in things, I just kept on going.  Then something came along and changed the direction. I went off with it. I didn’t know where it was going to lead me. It just keeps on leading me."

– Grace Murray Hopper, from 'Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times' by Lynn Gilbert

The oral biography of Grace Murray Hopper, whose work with early computers transformed mathematical symbols into words, helping to usher in the era of technology.

This brief chapter is available for .99  on Amazon and Apple,  one of 42 chapters that recounts the accomplishments, frustrations and passions of the great women of the 1920s - 1970s.

GRACE MURRAY HOPPER & "YESTERDAY'S" ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke

At a moment when the internet is becoming so enormously lucrative, it's humbling to look back and think about all the many many people who contributed to our ability to see new worlds from the palms of our hands today.

"Anybody who’s been bitten by the computer bug and had the fun of making . . . things do things in the fraction of the time and make them do all sorts of things you never had any chance to do, why . . . you want to keep on doing it.

I have insatiable curiosity. It’s solving problems. Every time you solve a problem, another one shows up immediately behind it. That’s the challenge . . . it’s always new and different.

Wouldn’t it be dull to do things that ended? I’m having a heck of a good time and contributing a little bit here and there to solving problems." from Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped our Times.

Read the chapter on Grace Murray Hopper, and learn about the surprising way how and why she created cobol, and transformed mathematical symbols into words, helping to usher in the Era of Technology and where the "world" can and does text....all the time. 

Go to Apple or Amazon and download a chapter.  It's just $0.99. It's a great deal.