IT WAS a world where women had little future, very much like the Madison Avenue evoked by the TV series Mad Men. This, however, was post-war computerland, where our heroine, Grace Hopper, wrote the first specification for COBOL, one of the most successful programming languages.
Beyer has admirably cast Hopper as a serious player in a fledgling industry rather than as the subject of some trashy biopic: first female maths graduate from Yale becomes Vassar College professor, quits for navy after Pearl Harbor, divorces husband and ends up at the cutting edge of a computer revolution.
His version captures…
