Grace Hopper (1906 – 1992)
U S Naval officer, and an early computer programmer.
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You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington.
At the end of about a week, I called back and said, "I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?"
I've received many honors and I'm grateful for them; but I've already received the highest award I'll ever receive, and that has been the privilege and honor of serving very proudly in the United States Navy.
At present, we're putting on paper a lot of stuff that never needed to be on paper. We do need to keep the records. But there isn't any reason for printing them. The next generation growing up with the computers will change that.
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
But Grace, then anyone will be able to write programs!
A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.
We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.
The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.
In total desperation, I called over to the engineering building, and I said, "Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me."
I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?"
Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.
To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.
I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.
I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.
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