Grace Hopper with UNIVAC-1 and a few human colleagues in 1957

Nathan Zeldes writes about Grace Hopper: “…whenever I see this photo, I am reminded vividly of Dr. Susan Calvin, Robopsychologist at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation, as featured in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot…. Calvin is a strict, prim, spinsterish lady who clearly feels more at home with robots than among humans, whom she treats with a dispassionate aloofness most of the time. She is also the smartest human in the book, by a large margin; an ultimate Geek, in fact.”

My favorite Hopper quote: “Programmers… arose very quickly, became a profession very rapidly, and were all too soon infected with certain amount of resistance to change.”

Well, here’s another favorite: “Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.”