A Hollywood biopic about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper(1906--1992) would go like this: a young professor abandons the ivy-covered walls ofacademia to serve her country in the Navy after Pearl Harbor and finds herself onthe front lines of the computer revolution. She works hard to succeed in theall-male computer industry, is almost brought down by personal problems but survivesthem, and ends her career as a celebrated elder stateswoman of computing, a heroineto thousands, hailed as the inventor of computer programming. Throughout Hopper'slater years, the popular media told this simplified version of her life story. In"Grace Hopper and the Invention" "of the""Information Age," Kurt Beyer reveals a more authentic Hopper, avibrant and complex woman whose career paralleled the meteoric trajectory of thepostwar computer industry. Both rebellious and collaborative, Hopper was influentialin male-dominated military and business organizations at a time when women wereencouraged to devote themselves to housework and childbearing. Hopper's greatesttechnical achievement was to create the tools that would allow humans to communicatewith computers in terms other than ones and zeroes. This advance influenced allfuture programming and software design and laid the foundation for the developmentof user-friendly personal computers.