The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, Inc. has been inspiring women in the computing world since 1994 by putting on the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Event. The first one was attended by 500 people in Washington, D.C. This year’s event hosted more than 12,000 attendees. Surprisingly, the origins of the event can be traced back to a chance encounter in a bathroom at a conference in the late 1980s.

Anita Borg came to Telle Whitney with an idea for Sisters, a network for women in their field in 1987. Borg was “passionate about getting more women in the field,” Whitney remarked. Whitney is now the CEO and president of the Anita Borg Institute. Whitney sat down Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at GHC 2015 to share a little about the women behind the event.

Grace Hopper: Pioneer in computer science

Grace Hopper was one the early computer scientists. Hopper was part of the invention process of both compilers and Cobalt coding language. She was the source of the term computer “bug,” originating with a moth that found its way into the Mark II computer at Harvard in 1945. The Rear Admiral of the U.S. Navy was also a bit of a wordsmith credited with many popular sayings, such as: “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission”; “The most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘It’s always been told this way”; and “You manage things. You lead people.”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Grace Hopper Celebration of Woman In Computing. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE