Revisiting the Grace Hopper Memorial Jar Opener

Once upon a time — October 1, 2010 apparently — I wrote a tumblr post about a story my father had then recently told me about Grace Hopper’s teaching. The gist of the story is that she taught a lecture in a course my father took with her (ca 1950’s) in which she explained what a computer is using a jar opener as an example. That approach would seem to be in line with Grace Hopper’s ethos of making computing accessible to non-technical people. As she explained in her 1980 oral history, “I’ve also for some reason been able to explain things to people without necessarily using a technical vocabulary… So I guess I’ve always been innately a teacher.” So — jar openers.

From time to time, I find myself telling this story to someone for some reason or other — but somehow, Google and I had both lost track of that old tumblr post. Finally, I’ve managed to dig it up. My memory of that fourteen-year-old conversation had shifted a bit in the interim. And, it stands to reason that my father’s memory of that class could have blurred a smidge in the fifty-some years before he relayed the anecdote to me.

Nevertheless, I imagine the broad outlines of the story are correct, and the anecdote seems at least sufficiently amusing to justify its not getting lost in the bowels of the internet again. So, I’ll link the 2010 post here. Hopefully at least I’ll be able to find it more readily, and maybe you’ll enjoy it too. My father’s gone now, but the Grace Hopper Memorial Jar Openers (both of them) — and his Grace Hopper jar opener story — live on.

Grace Hopper Memorial Jar Opener (Edlund “Top-Off” mid-century model), October 2024

My October 2010 Tumblr post:

https://www.tumblr.com/uebergeek/1225192197/introducing-the-grace-hopper-memorial-jar-opener