Wednesday, July 18, 2012

When Grace Hopper gave a nanosecond to David Letterman



We were huge Commodore (later Rear Admiral) Hopper fans, back at Three Letter Agency.
Letterman (asking about her work on the first computer, the Harvard Mark I): Now how did you know so much about computers back then?

Hopper: I didn't.  It was the first one.
Awesome.  She's known (likely apocryphally) for coining the term "bug":


Rest in peace, Admiral.  I hope that Gödel's incompleteness theorem doesn't, err, bedevil your programming in Heaven.

8 comments:

CoolChange©© said...

How awesomely simple those illustrations were. It seems that was back when Letterman didn't think he was God's gift to humanity. He was quite respectful of her. And she was quite a lady.

Thanks for that.

SiGraybeard said...

Yeah, thanks for that. I've been in radio really since I was 13, but her demonstration of a nanosecond has stuck with me ever since I first saw it - and it was probably around the time of that interview.

Dave H said...

What a lady. We need more like her. She's the one who said, “It’s always easier to apologize for something you’ve already done than to get approval for it in advance.”

Old NFO said...

I was priviledged to meet her and hear her speak a couple of times. She closed her speech up at JHU with that question and you could see folks reaching for calculators, and she pulled a piece of string out and said, "It's THIS long!" and that ended her speech. :-)

Borepatch said...

I forget how I ran across this, but I was a HUGE Grace Hopper fan, Back In The Day.

Still am, actually.

lelnet said...

She's so awesome I'm even willing to forgive her for COBOL. :)

ZerCool said...

LMAO ... classic - and thanks for an introduction to a name I didn't know.

Anonymous said...

It was my privilege to meet Admiral Hopper on several occasions. The nanosecond talk was informative and memorable. I'll never forget how far an electron moves in that tiny sliver of time.