Lawrence D'Oliveiro
2024-08-31 04:13:00 UTC
The video footage has been resurrected of a talk that Grace Hopper
gave to the NSA in 1982
<https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/we-can-now-watch-grace-hoppers-famed-1982-lecture-on-youtube/>.
She might be best remembered for being one of the brains (the major
brain?) behind COBOL, but as that article indicates, she did a lot of
other important work besides that. I would take issue with the claim
that COBOL is “still the major programming language used today”; I
don’t think that’s been true for at least 20 years.
I do remember another YouTube clip somewhere, I think she was talking
to David Letterman. She had brought along a few of her famous
“nanoseconds” -- lengths of wire cut to 30-cm lengths, available in
various colours, representing the distance that light travelled
through space in a nanosecond. She said that, whenever some top brass
complained to the technical underlings (like her) that it took too
damn long for signals to go between satellites in orbit and ground
stations, and couldn’t they do something about it, she would pull out
one of these, and explain that it took an awful lot of these
nanoseconds, joined end to end, to bridge the gap between the two
points, which is why the signals took a corresponding amount of time
to do the same.
gave to the NSA in 1982
<https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/we-can-now-watch-grace-hoppers-famed-1982-lecture-on-youtube/>.
She might be best remembered for being one of the brains (the major
brain?) behind COBOL, but as that article indicates, she did a lot of
other important work besides that. I would take issue with the claim
that COBOL is “still the major programming language used today”; I
don’t think that’s been true for at least 20 years.
I do remember another YouTube clip somewhere, I think she was talking
to David Letterman. She had brought along a few of her famous
“nanoseconds” -- lengths of wire cut to 30-cm lengths, available in
various colours, representing the distance that light travelled
through space in a nanosecond. She said that, whenever some top brass
complained to the technical underlings (like her) that it took too
damn long for signals to go between satellites in orbit and ground
stations, and couldn’t they do something about it, she would pull out
one of these, and explain that it took an awful lot of these
nanoseconds, joined end to end, to bridge the gap between the two
points, which is why the signals took a corresponding amount of time
to do the same.