(written in 2018)
When Yale decided to rename one of its residential colleges, my
college, from Calhoun to Grace Hopper, I was annoyed. I was used
to the old name and had no problem with it. I didn't associate
it with an historical person, anymore than I did Silliman or
Berkeley or Morse or Pierson. When I was there, the historical figure
was never mentioned. There was no statue, no painting. It was
just a name.
Then I remembered that I had met Captain
Grace Hopper, had heard her deliver a speech, and had written an
article about her back in 1983, when I worked for DEC, the
minicomputer company.
She was short, frail, and feisty. (She came to my chin,
and I'm not tall). She
was grandmotherly, but no-nonsense. By her very presence, she
commanded respect. She
reminded me of Margaret Meade delivering her lectures in Woolsey
Hall my senior year. Twenty-five
years later, I remember three of the anecdotes Captain Hopper
told back then.
She said that in her office she had a clock
that ran counter-clockwise, as a reminder not to take anything
for granted, not to presume that the way things have always been
done is the only way.
Then she held up a foot-long piece of wire
and said that that's a nanosecond.
Who can imagine a "nanosecond" -- a billionth
of a second? And
who can grasp its importance?
But she held it there in her frail hands. And it was the key to
technological development.
That's the distance that light and
electricity travel in a nanosecond. And if you are
designing a computer system, and you want to make it faster and
hence more powerful, you don't need to invent anything new. You just have to make
the circuits smaller. Reduce
the size in half and the electricity only has to go half as far,
so the circuit will operate twice as fast. With that piece of
wire, she made the past and future of computer technology
tactile, immediate, unforgettable.
Then she talked about working on one of the
earliest computers, the Mark I, during World War II. She said, "It was 51
feet long, 8 feet high, 8 feet deep, in a magnificent glass
case." In those
days the power of today's cellphone was only imaginable in
science fiction set hundreds of years in the future. But in its
day, that computer was unique and amazingly powerful. As she said, "It was
the first tool that assisted the power of man's brain instead of
the strength of his arm." One
day it stopped working, and no one knew why. By theory, by
everything that was known in that day, the failure made no
sense. So she went
into that glass-encased room and took a look. This was before the
days of cathode ray tubes, much less integrated circuits. The guts of the
machine consisted of a series of mechanical switches. And one of those
switches had closed on and crushed a moth. She took out the
moth, and the computer worked again. She then taped the
moth in her log book and entered, "Bug found." That's the origin of
the expression "a computer bug."
So thinking about the name change led me to
dig up the article I wrote about her and post it on my web site
(at http://www.seltzerbooks.com/snap3.html). She was an important
person, worthy of naming a residential college after.
But still, it feels strange for Calhoun to be
renamed for a computer pioneer, given that, when I was there,
computers were in their infancy, and I had never seen one, much
less used one, and there was no Computer Science major (at least
as far as I knew).
Little did I know then, as an English major,
that I would spend most of my working life at DEC, the world's
second largest computer company. At Yale I wrote about Dryden's
heroic drama. But
when I got a job, I ended up writing about technology. And the
technology I wrote about changed the world we live in. And now, just a few
decades later, that technology and that world feel ancient and
obsolete.
I can't help but imagine that in some
Isaac-Asimov-inspired future, after the ultimate battle between
humans and robots when (hopefully) robots have been defeated and
banned, and computer technology has been demonized as the root
of a terrible evil that nearly doomed mankind, Grace Hopper
College will be renamed -- perhaps Asimov College.
Name changes can serve as wake-up calls,
making us realize that the world has changed and that we have
changed as well.
By the time I met Grace Hopper, in 1983, just
14 years after graduation, the Viet Nam War was a distant
memory, business was booming, and computers were transforming
business and society. Business
computers and home computers and videogames. And I found myself
making a living writing about technology that hadn't existed
when I was at Yale studying English literature.
Then turn the dial forward another 14 years,
to 1997, and the high tech products and the business principles
of 1983 were obsolete. The
Internet connected everybody to everybody, giving rise to new
business models and life styles.
DEC wasn't changing fast enough and was on the brink of
demise. And my job there had changed. Now my title was "Internet
Evangelist," and
the company was sending me around the world to deliver my
message that in industry after industry the business dynamics
were changing, opening new opportunites and presenting new risks
and challenges. I
was preaching that businesses needed to adapt rapidly, while,
ironically, the company that was paying me to deliver that
message didn't heed it. With
no technical education whatsoever, I found myself in the
position of writing books about the Internet and being
considered an expert in a field that hadn't existed 14 years
before. And that
year, my oldest son, Bob graduated from Yale. (He, too, was in
Calhoun). And his major was molecular biophysics and
biochemistry, a field that didn't exist when I graduated.
Click forward another 14 years to 2011, and I
was making a living as a publisher of electronic books -- a kind
of business that hadn't existed before. My company consisted
of just me and my wife, Barbara, with occasional help from two
of our sons. We
took classics of literature and history, works old enough to be
in the public domain, and put them in formats readable on
handheld devices, and sold them through massive online stores
lke Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook. I was publishing works
that I once studied at Yale.
I was doing an electronic equipvalent of the Modern
Library, with a few PCs, working out of our basement. When my youngest son
started college the next yet, majoring in East Asian Studies,
one of his textbooks was a book that he had converted into an
ebook the year before.
Now, just seven years later, that business is
obsolete, that market having been flooded by competitors. Works
that had been profitable to publish electronically before are
now readily available in the needed formats for free. My children are all
living their own lives. My
wife, Barbara, is dead. And
I find myself reading books I should have read back in college
and writing books that will never be published and going out on
Match dates.
This is a world in which everyone connects to
everyone else with cellphones, with apps that work in ways that
challenge my not-so-nimble fingers. And I have much to learn to
keep up. New
challenges. New
opportunities. The world is a kaleidoscope. Adapt and enjoy.
Yes, the world has changed, and I have
changed as well. When
I met Grace Hopper, she was a little old lady, older than my
grandmother. She was an ancient 77. Now I'm 72, and some
of the women I meet from Match don't look much different than
she did then. And I
probably look elderly to them.
So what does all this mean, having lived
through four transformations of business and society?
I've grown to appreciate the value of a
liberal non-career-oriented education. Rather than focus on
learning what was needed for a single career that would soon
become obsolete, I learned how to learn and how to think
critically. I
learned to look at complex subjects in a simple concrete way,
rather than being intimidated by what I, at first, did not
understand. And
some of Grace Hopper's words and gestures from a single speech
back in 1983 still resonate with me.
To make a computer that works twice as fast,
make it twice as small. And
if something unexpected screws up your complex creation, don't
rely on theory and diagnostic programs. Rather, take a close
look without the bias of preset ideas, and maybe you'll find
something unexpected, like her moth, something that you too
could tape in a log book and call a "bug".
One suggestion about the renaming: her Navy
title was important to her. She wasn't "Grace Hopper". She was
"Captain Grace Hopper." She ended her speech 25 years ago, "I've
had such a happy time the last 15 years. It's been busy,
challenging. I have loved every minute of it. I have also
received most of the honors that are given to anyone in the
computer industry. Each time I have received one, I've thanked
them, then told them, as I tell you: I have already received the
highest award I will ever receive, no matter how long I live, no
matter how many more jobs I have. And that has been the
privilege and responsibility of serving very proudly in the
United States Navy."
If you wish to honor her better, give her
back her title, make it "Captain Grace Hopper College."
seltzer@seltzerbooks.com
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