Admiral Grace Hopper: Computing Pioneer

Admiral Grace Hopper joined the Navy in her 30s and became one of the pioneers of computing. In the early 1950s, a time when people thought computers could only do arithmetic, she built a compiler (a program that can turn the code humans write into something the machine can understand). By the 1960s she had written the language COBOL.

This is a video of her giving a nano stick to David Letterman. A nano stick was a piece of wire that represented the distance light could travel in a nanosecond. Seems like she was pretty cool. It's a fun interview.