Grace Hopper & the Invention of the Information Age

Thirty years ago this year, a National Women's History Project was born. It expanded National Women's History Week to every part of the country. In 1987, it convinced Congress to formally enact a declaration every year that March is Women's History Month. That declaration is renewed every year. And guess what? Like, unlike so many things in Washington these days, it's completely bipartisan. So if we could only tap a little of that spirit and apply it to some other things, that would be great. But I do want to say the theme of Women's History Month this year is writing women back into history. So we think that is just a fascinating effort to be part of, and we're proud to be a part of it, and to join with history and arts and cultural and scientific institutions all over America recognizing the enormous range of women's achievements, not just in computing, but ecology and art and architecture and sports and politics and well beyond. Grace Hopper, as we'll hear about more today, occupies a special place in that environment because she was the first person admitted to our Hall of Fellows. You may know that our hall enshrines the great pioneers of computing and the impact their work has had on our lives. There are only 52 fellows in the Hall of Fellows. Grace was the first. And so it's entirely appropriate and a source of pride for us that she was the founding inductee and the focus of our celebration of women's history. Now I mentioned we'd be celebrating two great things that California represents to us, and if Women's History Month and the invention of it here in California is one, then my friend Linda O'Brien is the second. Linda has been here once before with great success to interview Gene Bartik when Gene Bartik was named a fellow in 2008. Gene, as you may know, is the last surviving member of the six women who programmed the ENIAC with Eckhart and Mockley back in those historic days when it was first getting started. Linda is an accomplished and decorated journalist, about as accomplished and decorated as any journalist you'll find in the country. She was, in keeping with Women's History Month, the first woman news director of a major television station in South Florida. She was the founding executive editor and co-anchor of Nightly Business Report on PBS, which is where we met just a couple of years ago, wasn't it, Linda, I think? And among her many and most recent highlights is this. In December, she was given a Lifetime Emmy Award for Business and Financial Reporting. Today, she is based at KQED. She's in charge of 160 people who produce cross-platform content for television, radio, and the internet in many areas. And if you've heard of or listened to or watched California Money and The Do List and Saving the Bay and Climate Watch, she started all of those things. And she's also doing new seasons of Quest, and if you enjoy that, you have Linda among the people to thank. She's one of the best interviewers in the business, and we're delighted to welcome her back today. She's going to introduce our distinguished guest, Dr. Kurt Beyer, and get the event underway. So please join me in giving a warm museum welcome to Linda O'Brien. Thank you so much, John, for those warm and kind remarks. It is a great pleasure to be here this afternoon as we celebrate Women's History Month at the museum. And John, you and your colleagues do such terrific work in highlighting and preserving and bringing alive the history of our community, the computer industry, and the people who have been so central to innovation and technology. At KQED and KTH, we are also celebrating women's history with special programming and documentaries throughout this month. So I was delighted to hear about today's event here. It is so much in sync with our values and what we feel is so important in the community. And it was great to hear the history of women's history. A year and a half ago, your event with Jean Bartik, the computer pioneer, telescoped the challenges that women faced in the 1940s, both during World War II and after, and how critical women were in really advancing those calculating machines for items like counting ballistics and firing tables. And I was struck by the event with Jean Bartik because there were so many Silicon Valley women in business who were very moved by seeing and meeting one of the women who had made such a difference in this industry. And their interest to me, and I talked to several of them before the event, said to me that there is such a need for women role models as we look back at history. And the fact, as John has said, there are just so many contributions that have gone unnoticed and unrecognized. So it is truly wonderful that the Computer History Museum is bringing forward another story of a pioneer whose work helped set the stage for computers as we know them. Author Kurt Baier chronicles the fascinating life of Grace Hopper. And his book, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, we will look forward to a conversation with Kurt about this truly amazing woman. And so many facts to consider when you think about Grace Hopper. First woman to receive a doctorate degree in mathematics from Yale. She was one of the first programmers to transform large digital computers from oversized calculating machines to those that could literally interpret human instructions. She invented the computer compiler to make programming languages easier to write. And she also developed a common language called Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL. And she was the first woman to reach the rank of Navy Admiral. When she retired in 1986, she was the oldest active officer in the Navy. But retirement did not stop her and she continued to lecture and consult for the rest of her life. Truly an amazing woman. She's one who fought discrimination in a male-dominated world and turned what others would take as harassment into a motivating force. So how did she do this? Well those are the kinds of questions we're going to be asking to author and professor Kurt Baier. He first encountered Admiral Hopper when he was a teenager attending his sister's graduation at William and Mary. And he credits this fiery speaker with influencing his own career decisions. And so a word about Kurt. He grew up in a blue-collar family in Long Island. His father was a baker and his mother was a nurse. He was captain of the baseball and basketball teams in high school and then went on to the U.S. Naval Academy where he played baseball and was named brigade commander. Then upon graduation he commissioned as an officer in the Navy but before attending flight school he stopped along the way for an education at the University of Oxford. He then headed to Naval Flight School where he graduated first in his class. He received a Navy Commendation and Defense Service Medal. He then returned to California where he completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. And fully immersed in the Bay Area, he co-founded a digital media startup. But then after September 11th, Kurt returned to Annapolis as a civilian professor and helped to create the Naval Academy's new information technology major. And then in 2006, and we're fortunate that he returned to the Bay Area to head up his digital media startup. He has authored multiple patents on high-speed digital data processing and currently he advises startups and executives in Silicon Valley. I have to say I see many parallels here to Admiral Hopper, Navy, high-tech innovation, service to community and country, not to mention exceptional grade point averages along the way. Welcome, Kurt Beyer. Kurt, I'd like to start with what it was that moved you at William & Mary when you first saw Grace Hopper speaking at your sister's graduation. Sure. She was in her 80s by that point and when she was sitting there and the president was introducing her, the first thing that caught my eye was that she was knitting. I thought, that's a little strange. And then she got up and the second thing that really shocked me was she started talking about the future and a future information age that didn't exist yet. And she kept on saying how we're only in the first inning. Being a baseball player, I like that reference. And if you think about it, when you talk to your grandmother or your grandfather, they usually talk about the past and how hard they had it back in the past and how easy you have it now. So I guess that was the second shocking thing was this is a woman in her 80s who is talking about a future that doesn't exist yet. And I'm a teenager and was just fascinated by that future that she was painting. And at that point, what future was she painting? She was painting the future of the personalization of computers, the ability of individuals to interact with those computers. And I got to experience it firsthand during my freshman year at the Naval Academy. She by this point had been in charge of all computing in the Navy. And so she reoriented the curriculum or helped to reorient the curriculum when I started in the mid-80s. And on that first day, we were issued our own computers. And we brought them up to our rooms and we plugged them in to something called Ethernet, which was connected to Milnet. And we could interact with our professors and post things, look at our grades, use something called email. Our medical and dental records were digital. And this is all happening in the mid-1980s. And then she showed up again. And she spoke to our freshman class and she told us how every aspect of our curriculum over the next four years will work computer science into it. And so again, I have to thank her for allowing the son of a baker to have these wonderful opportunities already in the 1980s. So what was it that drove Grace Hopper? One of the readings was so interesting. When she was a child, you know, the idea she took apart this alarm clock and she couldn't put it back together. And so she took seven more apart. So, sounds familiar. So, you know, the sort of theme of curiosity, was that what drove her? What was it that made her the amazing Grace Hopper? Sure. I think to capture that intense curiosity, if we look at the first day that she started on the job with Howard Aiken at the Harvard Computation Laboratory, she thought she would be working in another field completely, cryptology. And she was sent to Harvard. She was met by a Marine Guard, brought down into the basement of the Krupp Laboratory. And there before her is a machine like she's never seen before, 81 feet long, 10 feet high, 750,000 moving parts. And her new boss tells her, you're in charge of it, make it work, and give me these problems in a week because we're in the middle of a war. Now I would panic, personally. I would also look for the manual of operation, but there was no manual. This is the first computer, right? So well, what did she do? She started talking to the engineers. She started looking at the hardware itself and figuring out how this machine worked. And once she figured out how it worked, then she could figure out how to start coding it. They didn't call programming at that point. So she just had this intense need to solve problems that were presented to her. I think it starts in her childhood, her parents, and I think a lot of women who are successful in the early part of the 20th century have parents who don't differentiate between boys and girls when they're educating them. And she had parents like that. So I think that was a critical part of her early education. So it gave her that confidence. You talk about the first 36 years of her life were marked by a certain amount of conventionality. What do you mean by that? Her education and her going to college even in those years. Sure. One thing I think that shocked me in the research was that we assume that women's rights constantly progress as we move forward in time. And what I discovered was that they actually ebb and flow. And during the 1920s, when she came of age, there were more women getting higher education in mathematics, for instance, than the time that it was surpassed was 1989. So there was this window of opportunity for her generation of women in the 20s to get masters and PhDs in math. And so that's what I meant by somewhat conventional. If you were from the upper middle class in the Northeast, a woman had these opportunities in the 1920s. So then starting out, she was teaching at Vassar. And another interesting facet about that that you talk about is how even her approach to mathematics was multidisciplinary, where she just didn't focus on the pure economics. She sort of broke the mold and maybe created some controversy there. Yeah, sure. I think this is an important aspect of Hopper's character as well. How does a person think out of the box? Well, the more we become an expert in a field, we tend to confine ourself with one way of thinking then. And so she consciously tried to avoid that from happening to herself. And one way she did it while she was at Vassar was every semester she would audit two classes that had nothing to do with mathematics, philosophy, architecture, history. And then she would try to apply something she learned back into her mathematics classes. That flexibility of mind is so critical when she's the one who really starts understanding that you can take hardware, computer hardware, and you can make it become anything you want it to become by changing the software. It's really a critical point which I think makes computers different than almost any technology before. And it really has a direct relationship to Hopper's tendency to not specialize in just one field. So interesting. So she was doing well. She received her tenure. But then everything changed. And that was a critical point in her life and the lives of many. So explain to us what happened. Sure. When you write a book, sometimes you don't know where to start the story. And most histories of computing or economic writings of the computing industry usually focus on the artifact itself. And my thinking was that that's too late because the artifact has been developed. What are the forces that led to the creation of the artifact? So I begin the book on a particular date. And that's December 7, 1941. And I picked that date as the beginning of the computer era because I think of our own experiences with 9-11. You know, the world was so different on September 10. And think about how things changed so rapidly after September 11, both on a macro level, different priorities for the country, funding and resources going into different areas, but also on the micro level. So many of my friends and I used that crisis to re-evaluate our own lives. And so I saw Hopper doing the same thing on December 7. December 6, she was married. She was a tenured track professor at Vassar. Six months after Pearl Harbor, she's quit her job, left her husband, and she's trying to join the Navy, even though the Navy doesn't allow women. No challenges there, just everyday life, right? And then when, so she enters the Navy, and even that, there were some surprises there where she thought she was going to go to midshipman school and then she ends up going to Harvard. Yep. So what happened? Well, sometimes you have, I was in the Navy, so sometimes you have wants and the Navy sometimes has needs. And especially during wartime, oftentimes the needs of the Navy outweigh the wants of the individuals. So she was expecting to work in cryptology with one of her former professors from Yale. And she ended up at Howard Aiken's Mark I Laboratory. And I described what the first day was like, but you can imagine what the first weeks were like because Aiken was horrified that he was sent a woman to be number two in charge. Aiken had made the decision to run the laboratory like a military operation rather than like a civilian scientific laboratory. So he was a commander. He made everyone call him commander. He wore his uniform. Everyone had to wear their uniforms. Everyone was military personnel. He had watches. They ran the operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And it actually worked out for Hopper better because it was set up like that. Because she had equal pay. She had the rank of lieutenant. She was in the military hierarchy, number two. So it actually afforded her some gender-neutral advantages. But as you say, he was horrified. So what turned things around? I mean, he was horrified that he had a woman to work with, but she must have really inserted herself in a way that was positive. Two things really turned it around. The first thing was the machine was built to do ballistic tables. But Washington, having found out that they have a calculating machine that can calculate at the amazing speed of three computations per second, decided that they needed to really use this tool for the advantage of the war. So they started sending up other problems that had nothing to do with ballistics tables. And these are the roots of computer programming. Hopper, out of necessity, has to figure out how to efficiently keep on reprogramming the machine. And so she develops the fundamental principles of programming. Subroutines are developed at this time. Documentation of programs. They actually build in parity checks. When there's only one computer in the world, how do you check if the answer's right after you process the answer? So she begins putting all these things into motion. Aiken starts becoming very impressed because she's so good at her job. And I think the thing that really wins him over is in the fall of 1944, he's visited by a mathematician named John von Neumann. Von Neumann has a particular problem, which is impossible to be solved by computers. Well, what's a computer in 1944? It's actually a person with a pencil and a piece of paper. And we would have these rooms of computers, and we would bring problems to them like you bring clothes to a laundromat, drop them off, they break up the problem, solve it with pencil and paper, and then give it back. And von Neumann's problem was so complicated, there was not enough time to solve the problem during the war. He needed to figure out how to cause a sphere to implode upon itself. And it had to implode upon itself at a perfect rate. And he had to know where to put the charges to cause the sphere to implode upon itself. Very difficult partial differential equation problem. Well, Hopper and her crew solved it in about four months. And the problem, of course, was the nuclear bomb. The implosion problem for the bomb. Got solved in time, could be used in the test bomb, it worked in the test bomb, and actually was the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, used that implosion problem. Six days after the bomb was deployed, Japan surrendered. So she became a very critical person. If you think of the people during World War II who were most critical to helping to end the war, I think Hopper has to rank pretty high up there. Again, one of those unrecognized stories that when you study history, you don't hear about that kind of story. So then the end of the war meant a big move for her again, for the whole team. And she followed Aitken, and what happened then? Well, I think she would have liked to have stayed with Aitken and at Harvard because by 1946, she really became a critical person in the operation. And she really enjoyed what she was doing. At that time, she was in uniform during the war, so she was an officer. And the military rewarded her efforts, especially solving the implosion problem, by dismissing her from the military because the war was over, we didn't need women as officers anymore. Aitken, who was a graduate student when the war started at Harvard, was named a full professor and was given funds to build his own building and to build the Harvard Mark II and Mark III. Harvard couldn't hire Hopper because they didn't have women as professors. Aitken really needed her. Yeah. And Aitken really needed her, so was able to give her an assistant research position with a two-year contract. So that's what she did for two years after the war. After the war. And then it seems to me that the whole pacing changed. And sort of describe that period, that two-year period. Sure. I go into the... In the book, I try to understand environments for innovation. And Aitken's military hierarchical environment was very good at getting things done in a timely fashion. It was very bad at innovation. So long as the urgency of the war was in place, Aitken's people worked hard for him. Once the war ended and that urgency was lost, innovation grounded to a halt at Harvard. So those final two years, other than programming innovations that Hopper continued to do, the hardware innovations in the Harvard Mark II and the Harvard Mark III became a dead end within the history of computers. Aitken, not knowing this, because he was a bit of a narcissist, he decided that he was going to share all the great learnings at Harvard with the rest of the community that was working on these types of machines. So in 1947, he and Hopper organized the first computer symposium. And they invite people from the ENIAC project in Philadelphia, from England, from the Whirlwind project at MIT. And for Aitken, he thought this was his grand moment. For the rest of the community, including his staff, they realized how far behind they are now after just two years post-war. And literally, everyone scatters. They all move on to these other programs. Out of that, interestingly enough, grows the Association of Computing Machinery. The founders of the ACM are Aitken's original crew, including Hopper. All right, well, we're going to be getting to some questions in just a moment, but the next era of her life really does involve innovation, working for now a company, Eckhart Malkley. And again, this was a startup company, a whole different atmosphere. She had her challenges during that period. She did. I was fortunate enough to find a letter in John Malkley's collection, which was an intervention letter written by Hopper's friends, mainly her friends from the Harvard crew. And after she was dismissed from Harvard, she went to the Eckhart Malkley Computer Corporation, really the only option she had if she wanted to stay in the industry. They were a startup. They were scarce on funding. And their main investor, six weeks after she joins, dies in a freak plane crash. She starts unraveling. And one cold winter night, she's behind bars in a Philadelphia police station. She got arrested for drunken disorderly conduct. She was bailed out by her Harvard friends. And by this point, she had become a raging alcoholic, and not just happy hour drinking, drinking 10 AM with the flask. She wasn't able to function three to four days out of the week. And she even tried to commit suicide. So we almost lost her in 1949. And it was the intervention of her friends and also Remington Rand stepping in to buy the startup that created the stability so that she could get back to work again on her vision. And I wanted to include that in the story because sometimes we hold our heroes up on a pedestal. And think of all the challenges that she was dealing with during that period. And eventually, it has to catch up with even the best and brightest. Did she continue to fight those demons for the rest of her life? Or did she truly turn the corner, do you think? Well, that was a debate on the book cover. We actually have her with a cigarette. And MIT Press wasn't so sure about that. I pushed for it because part of who she was was a drinker and a smoker. And I think she controlled it, but she was always dependent on both. All right, the Remington Rand era, this brought in a whole new way for her now to create, to innovate, and also to be, in a way, a salesperson. Yeah, that's right. The team that she had at Remington Rand, many of them came from that original ENIAC project. Gene Bartek was one of them. Betty Hall Burton was another. And their work really begins after an incredible marketing coup that Remington Rand does during the Eisenhower-Stevenson presidential election. This is the first televised presidential election. And someone in marketing got the idea to build a replica of a Univac next to Walter Cronkite's desk during the presidential televised event. They took data, voting data from the years before, put it into a real Univac. And with 1% of the vote coming in that night, the real Univac predicted that Eisenhower would win by a landslide, 491 electoral votes to 89. The Roper polls and Nielsen ratings were saying it was going to be a close race. So Walter Cronkite, the most honest man in America, lied and told everyone that the Univac said it's going to be a close race. Well, the next day, the results come in. It's 490 to 90. The Univac missed by one electoral vote with 1% of the vote in. It went back on TV. A representative from Univac went on TV. They told America what the real results were. You can imagine every CEO in the country started thinking, these machines can predict the future. We need to get one of these. And that's when her work really began. That is amazing. And that election story, I thought back to 2000, where we were also having problems with election returns. And they didn't have the Twitter feed then, or Facebook, or any of those tools. But amazing that that sort of news story could then change the course of history, really, in terms of that. All right, we will talk more about her ongoing career. But I want to take a question from the audience. And that is, if Grace Hopper were alive today, what do you think she would be doing? Now, I don't work for Apple in any way. Do we have any Apple people here? But she would definitely have one of these. She'd be about, what, 105 now? But she'd still have one of these. And I really think that these smart devices are the culmination of her vision. What people don't realize, especially, I think, engineers, and I was an engineer undergrad, is that there is no inherent logic to a certain technology. Technologies don't have to evolve a certain way. There's no inevitability of the way they evolve. Hopper constantly reminded herself that by having a clock on the wall in her office that ran backwards and had the numbers backwards. The clock again. And in those early years of computers, computers were following the same path that any other technology was following at that time. Single purpose use. So if you build a lawnmower, invent a lawnmower, it mows lawns. So you really don't want to use it for any other things. And that's what those first computers were as well. They were ballistic table machines. And it's Hopper who I think is really the one, out of necessity during the war, but then she continues this vision that let's keep the machine general and let's change it with the software. It's really the software which is the magic ingredient. So she had that vision. She built the tools for that vision. So after that event, the presidential event, she created the compiler. They created the first high-end programming languages. Talk about a way to break the glass ceiling. She went to her management team in 1954 after getting all these orders for Univax and said, we need to form a department of programming. We need a staff. We need a budget. And make me the director of programming. And she became the director of programming in 1954. So it's Hopper's vision, I think, which was critical in creating this type of world for us. It could have gone a different direction. Well, when you talk about the compiler and the language, she also had this ability to sort of take programming and distribute it. How did all of that work? Because there were programmers who were not real happy with what she was doing. Right, right. She helped to create that initial programming community. And then some of them turned on her because I think they wanted to remain an elite group, kind of the priests of these machines. And Hopper kept on pushing to democratize the programs, make them easier and easier to use so you don't need a PhD in mathematics to program. And I think the culmination of this vision was when she organized the conference to create COBOL. So first, how she created COBOL was interesting in and of itself. She pulled in experts from the manufacturers. There were 10 manufacturers represented, seven government organizations represented, about 10 or 12 users represented. And for two days, they brainstormed about what would be the ideal common business language. She created a committee then, which would generate the initial standards for the language. Just so happened everyone on the committee used to work for her and half of them were women. So she kind of stacked the deck in her favor. But they created, and it's about 50 years ago this month, actually, the standards for COBOL. And the programming community hated it. They thought it was a terrible language. It was too verbose. It was too far away from the hardware. Yet, Hopper knew something that they didn't. If you want the technology to survive in the real world, you can't let a programmer develop it. You need to get the feedback and input from all users. And what you end up maybe is a second best solution, but that second best solution may have the ability to survive in the real world. And look at today. 50 years later, 70% of all active code is still COBOL. And the Y2K problem was a COBOL problem. That's amazing. So it's a pretty successful program. And that thread runs in so many different types of businesses and disciplines, where it's not just the inventor or the creator. It's how it is mass produced and received if you get that input. So here's a great question. This individual says, I attended Grace Hopper's Computer History Museum talk in Marlboro, Massachusetts in spring of 1982. Question, did anyone in the audience, anyone else attend that talk? There's our grander public knowledge. Most people don't know who Grace Hopper is. Yeah, that's right. And so I guess if you look at the motivations for writing the book, when I came out here in 97 to Silicon Valley during the great dot-com gold rush, and was being told by all these 25, 30 year olds how they're inventing the information age, none of them had ever heard of Grace Hopper before. So that kind of shocked me. It's probably a few factors. One, during the time that she's working, it was still a very specialized. We can't imagine that not everyone knew about computers back in the 50s and 60s. But few people did. The average person didn't. Two, we don't see software becoming an industry in and of itself really until the 60s and 70s. So when she's doing her main work in the 40s, 50s, and early 60s, open source really was the standard of the day. She shared her information with people at IBM and people at Raytheon, and the software was included and given away with the hardware. And it really is the antitrust case in the end of the 60s with IBM where the government forces the two to be separated, which really creates the software industry. So sadly, if you're not making a lot of money from your technology, you could get lost within history. Your book also talks about IBM and Remington Rand, and why was it that Remington Rand stayed where it did and IBM sort of leapfrogged? I thought that was a fascinating observation. Yeah, and it actually ties into today very well also as we're seeing this new balance between private sector funding and government funding of innovation. So Remington Rand definitely had the lead during the first five years of the 1950s. They had the best technology. They had a programming department. They had the most installations. They were also fighting against an IBM which was run by old Thomas Watson, Sr., who thought that these electric computers were a fad. And most interpretations of why IBM rises so quickly and is so dominant by 1960 usually use the antitrust case against IBM as evidence. And so that argument broke out on two sides. One, IBM was using its monopoly power in other areas to underprice with the 704 and the 705 which allowed it to beat Remington Rand. IBM's argument was we had better technology, we had better sales force. My conclusion is that IBM didn't have better technology. Their sales force wasn't very good at selling these machines. Their 701 did horribly. It was they were very good at bidding on government projects right at the time when Thomas Watson, Jr. was starting to get more influence in the company. And that single project that they won which really changed everything for them was the SAGE project. By show of hands, who has heard of SAGE? What? This is a well-informed group. Wow. I usually have one hand up in the audience. Okay, who worked on SAGE? Let me hear it. Bob, Bob. Woo! Well, SAGE was actually three times larger than the Manhattan Project. It was initiated after the Soviets exploded a nuclear bomb well ahead of when we thought they would explode one. And so we were then attempting to build this massive early warning detection system around North America to protect us from bombers, long-range bombers. What they realized was that the best way to control this environment was through computers. And so Remington Rand was the lead. Initially, Leslie Groves from the Manhattan Project was actually working at Remington Rand. But in the 11th hour, IBM won the contract. And what did they win? It was a $1 profit contract. It was a cost-plus contract. But the government built their factories, they hired thousands of engineers and programmers, and they had to build 56 of these machines so they learned how to build, mass-produce them. But the key critical IP part was the Whirlwind Project at MIT was transferred to IBM. And I think that was really which allowed them to leapfrog then from a technical point of view. Another case of government and private and how it really changed things. So we want to get to a few more questions before we wrap up. What inning would Admiral Hopper say we're in now? And to keep in the baseball spirit, and what, if any, have been our home runs? Wow. Baseball fan. Great question. I think we're in the bottom of the fourth right now. There's two outs. We've got two men on. And what would be some of the great changes? Well, if you look from her perspective of trying to democratize the technology, I think that's how we have to judge this question. The fact that the internet, which is going to be 40 this year, becomes a mass market tool in the early 90s, I think that was a critical juncture. And I think we're still in maybe the first or second inning of that development as well. I'm really just shocked by the changes that have occurred in the last three or four years versus what we saw in the 90s. Right here, I think there's been a billion apps sold already and most people didn't know what an app was two or three years ago. So I think the democratization of computers and the technology and the mass adaption of the internet are the home runs. All right, if Grace Hopper were here today, what one question would you most like to ask her? Wow. These are hard. My wife is a romantic and she always wants to watch romance films with me and she's tired of me watching The Matrix for the 14th time. And so she's always asking me, well, after she got divorced, did she date anyone? Did she have an affair with Aitken? Who was she hooking up with? So we'll find out. So I'd have to ask her that. Okay, so what would you think the answer would be? We'll find out. That's your next book, right? Next book. So before we close, one last question. Lessons learned from Grace Hopper's life for the computer industry in particular. I think there's a lot of lessons that all of us can apply to our own work today. And one important lesson is if you're gonna be an inventor or product manager, you have to be a very good salesperson. Now that's what Hopper was so good at. If I think of her greatest skill sets, it wasn't the fact that she was a PhD in mathematics. She had great writing skills, great presentation skills, and she constantly pushed her vision. Her vision was not inevitable, but she was so good at presenting it. So I think that's one important lesson for us. I think some of her leadership skills can be applied today. She would always say, you lead people, you manage things. So what were some of those leadership skills? One, she liked to empower the youngest people on her teams. So if she had a really difficult problem, she'd assign it to the person with the least experience. And you'd think that's counterintuitive, like why she would do that. But Hopper would say, because they don't realize that they should fail. And she didn't expect them to solve the problem, but she hoped that they would look at it in a different way. And if she could get a kernel or a clue from that, then she could take the problem and give it to more senior staff members. So that was a technique she used a lot. I think distributed invention is something that she applied very well. And I tried to blow up the myth of the genius inventor who goes down in their basement for two years and then comes up and presents the world with the solution to solve all their problems. It doesn't work that way. Hopper was a conductor of innovation, a conductor of invention. Yeah, she may have invented some of the kernels, like the original compiler, but she was so good at getting many minds to be working on the problems that she defined and then sharing the information amongst all of them. So I think that's another critical lesson we can learn. Terrific lessons learned. Thank you so much, Kurt Beyer, Grace Hopper, Grace Hook.