by Richard Seltzer, from DECWORLD, the company
newspaper, July 1983
Proud and feisty, Captain Grace Hopper talked
about computers as she has known them since 1944 and as common
sense tells her they should be in the future. She told of how she
leads her small Navy crew of programmers, educates her bosses in
the Pentagon, and haunts anyone who says, "But we've always done
it that way." The Digital audience, convened at the invitation of
the Communications Industry Group in Merrimack, NH, to hear
"thought on innovation," responded to her non-stop hour and a half
barrage of wit and wisdom with a standing ovation. The following
article is based on her remarks.
"Typically, people make plans for the use of
computers based on what they are doing now and the equipment they
have now. They fail to review those plans int he light of what
they will be doing and
the equipment that will
be available in the future. This
is a critical review that has to be made of every plan, no matter
what you're doing.
"Probably the most dangerous phrase that can be
used in any computer installation is, 'But we've always done it
that way.' That phrase is forbidden in my office. To emphasize
that fact, I keep a clock that operates counter-clockwise. The
first day, you have a little trouble telling time. By the second
day, most people have discovered that what used to be 10 of is now
10 after. By the third day, they recognize there was never any
reason why clocks had to run clockwise.
I'd like to give each one of you a small gift.
If during the next 12 months anyone of you says 'But we've always
done it that way,' I will instantly materialize beside you and
haunt you for 24 hours. I know it works because I've already had
over a hundred letters thanking me for haunting people. We can no
longer afford to use that phrase.
"We've got to take chances, try new things and
move towards the future. We've also got to recognize that's not
going to be easy. But if you let yourself get frustrated, you're
licked from day one.
"Once, an officer who had to take his squadron
out to an aircraft carrier was told he'd have to leave all his
maintenance records in the Naval Air Rework Facility. Well, this
didn't please him. He wanted the maintenance records for his
planes with him. So he bought a personal computer, made friends
with a programmer who could copy his maintenance records onto it,
put the computer into a case that could fit behind his seat, and
flew off to the carrier with all of his maintenance records in the
computer. When he
came back, he told the Department of Defense Computer Institute
about it. Somebody there said, "Are you supposed to do that?" He
said, "I didn't ask."
"Remember, on many occasions, it's much easier
to apologize than it is to get permission. A ship in port is safe,
but that's not what ships are built for. We've got to sail the
sea, because that's what ships are built for."
Grace recalled her first encounter with a
computer, MARKI, the world's first large scale digital computer,
on July2, 1944. "It was 51 feet long, 8 feet high, 8 feet deep, in
a magnificent glass case. It had 72 words of storage and could do
3 additions a second. It would get two quantities from memory, add
them together and put the answer back three times a second or once
every 333 milliseconds (thousandths of a second). That sounds
pitiful today, but it was the first tool that assisted the power
of man's brain instead of the strength of his arm.
"Not until 1951 was there a commercial
electronic computer -- UNIVAC I. It had a thousand 12-character
words of storage. In other words, UNIVACI was a 12k microcomputer,
but it ran all the premium notices for Metropolitan Life. (We seem
to have forgotten what a dedicated computer can do.) It did an
addition in 282 microseconds -- a thousand times faster.
"By 1964, the first of the CDC 6400s came out.
It could do an addition in 300 nanoseconds, 300 billionths of a
second -- another thousand times faster.
"Now, we need a system that adds in 300
picoseconds, trillionths of a second -- another thousand times
faster. We need it right now, but we can't build it the way we've
been building the dinosaurs of the past. We're going to have to do
something different.
"We need it because we're soon going to have to
face some major problems. The population of the world is
increasing, so we have to increase food and water supplies. The
biggest assist to increasing food supplies would be better
long-term weather forecasts. We don't yet have a computer which
can run the full scale model of that big heat engine made up of
earth, atmosphere and ocean. We're not even sure of our techniques
because we've never had the computer power to run it. Up until a
few years ago, we didn't have the data to feed into those models.
But now we have satellite photographs that when fully enhanced by
computer enable us to tell how high the waves are in the middle of
the Pacific and what the temperature of the ocean is 20 feet below
the surface. But to fully enhance a satellite photograph takes ten
to the fifteenth power (one quadrillion) arithmetic operations.
That takes close to 3 days on our best computers today.
"We're going to have trouble getting the
powerful new computers we need because we're reaching the
physi8cal limit of the speed of light or electricity. Think of a
length of wire. In a microsecond (millionth of a second)
electricity can go 984 feet.
In a nanosecond, a billionth of a second, it goes 11.8
inches. In a picosecond (trillionth of a second), the distance it
goes is no bigger than the little pieces you get from chopping
something up in a pepper grinder.
"I said I wanted to add in 300 picoseconds, a
third of a nanosecond. But electricity doesn't go fast enough to
cover the distance in a computer from memory to adder with the
numbers to be added and then back to memory with the answer in
that short a time. So what can I do? I can't wait for our bright
young engineers to find some way to get beyond the velocity of
light. I need that computer in the next five years.
"Back in the early days of this country, when
heavy objects had to be moved around, people used oxen. When they
had a big log that one ox couldn't budge, they didn't try to grow
a bigger ox. They used 2 oxen. Likewise, when you need greater
computer power, you don't have to build a larger computer; you can
get another computer.
:Long ago we should have recognized that the
answer is not to build bigger and bigger mainframes, but to build
systems of computers. That is where the future lies.
:One such system is being put together at NASA. It consists of 128 by
128 processors (chips). That 16,384 processors all in one system.
We think it's going to be as big as MARK I. There's one cabinet
that holds the processors, a second cabinet holds the input/output
and control and a third cabinet that's a PDP-11/34, because
obviously, you can't run 16,000 computers without having a
computer to do it with.
:Each of those processors will receive one
pixel (small piece of graphic information) from the satellite
photographs, including position, color, brightness. It will be used to hunt
for oil and minerals. That's the largest integrated system of
computers that I know of so far.
"You're going to see more and more systems of
computers in business applications as well. Inventory and payroll
don't belong on the same computer. We put them together because we
could only afford one computer, but that is no longer true. It
doesn't matter whether the computers are all in one room or spread
all over the world. We
now have the communications and the software to have those
computers work together.
"I'm deeply grateful to every manufacturer of
micro and minicomputers because my guess is that's the real
future. The micros, the minis, the communications.
"We're only at the beginning of this industry,
at the Model-T stage. We're at the stage of that first airplane
that I flew in 1924, built out of linen and wood and wire, a
biplane with an open cockpit. It went up about 150 feet and
floated along about 80 miles an hour. We haven't got the jets yet,
we're only at the beginning.
The future is up ahead of us."
Grace Hopper, a Captain in the U.S. Naval
Reserve, likes to be introduced as the third programmer on the
first large scale digital computer so she "can remind you that the
first large scale digital computer was a Navy computer, operated
by Navy crew in World War II."
In the early 1950s she was instrumental in
developing the first compiler -- the software that made it
possible to communicate with a computer in words rather than
numbers and to have a computer do more than just arithmetic. Her efforts led to the
development and widespread use of COBOL and other high level
computer languages.
At the age of 60, on December 1966, the
'saddest day' of her life, she was officially place on the Naval
Reserve Retired List. Then
just a few months later, she was called back for six months of
temporary active duty, her assignment: to standardize the high
level languages and get the whole Navy to use them. As she put it,
"So far, it's the longest 6 months I ever spent in my life." Today
[1983] she's still working on that task and, in other ways,
letting the armed forces and the U.S. government know how they can
use common sense to eliminate waste in their vast data processing
operations.
She concluded her talk to the Communications
Industry Group by saying "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."
Captain Grace Hopper, U.S. Naval Reserve,
computer pioneer. After she retired from the Navy in 1966, the
Navy called her back and she worked for them for another 20 years,
finally retiring in 1986, at the age of 80. Then she went to work
for DEC as a consultant, until her death in 1992.
seltzer@seltzerbooks.com
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