Randi Harper

“It was warm in the summer of 1945; the windows were always open and the screens were not very good. One day the Mark II stopped when a relay failed. They finally found the cause of the failure: inside one of the relays, beaten to death by the contacts, was a moth. The operator carefully fished it out with tweezers, taped it in the logbook, and wrote under it “first actual bug found.”
― Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea

“You fear me, because you don't know what I am. I look like a woman, I sound like a man, and your reason tells you the sum total is impossible!”
― Anonymous

“Gildersleeve was directed to draw up the initial plans for a women’s naval force, although, as she expressed it later, “. . . if the Navy could possibly have used dogs or ducks or monkeys, certain of the older admirals would probably have greatly preferred them to women.”
― Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea

“She further claimed that she could make a computer do anything she could completely define. This announcement was met with great skepticism, but of course she was right.39 Hopper foresaw no end to the education of her computer. She told her colleagues that at present the UNIVAC had “a well grounded mathematical education fully equivalent to that of a college sophomore.” Moreover, the computer neither forgot nor made mistakes. It was making good progress in its undergraduate studies and was well on the way to graduation. “It is inevitable,” Hopper wrote, “that it will present itself as a candidate for a graduate degree.”
― Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea