The nice thing about an open frontier is that it's really easy to be an innovator. If you put more than a passing thought into almost anything in the vast Terra Incognita you're faced with, you are now the world expert.

Today Grace Hopper's "compiler" wouldn't merit the name, it's just a linker loader, what's the big deal? Well the big deal was nobody had actually programmed the computer to help them program the computer before. A huge sub-discipline of computer science simply didn't exist.

Consider another discipline, metrology. Pioneers in metrology weren't doing advanced physics like you would see in a metrology lab today, they just had the insight that it sure is easier if everybody agrees how much corn this is, so they used prototypes, which is pretty much the simplest strategy but it's already a huge improvement on nothing at all. It took until this century for the last prototype (the Kilogram) to be replaced. On the route there those prototypes got a lot more sophisticated, and we learned a lot more about what it actually means to have a certain amount of a thing, so metrology got much harder.