100 Years of “Amazing Grace” Hopper

by Bryan

6 comments

1 Steve Bates { 12.10.06 at 1:34 am }

“Amazing Grace” is one of the genuine heroes of anyone who studies the history of computing… and is most certainly one of mine. I wish she’d lived to be 100; she would surely have a few things to teach the folks in Washington today.

I particularly liked this quote from your earlier post: “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.” Indeed… especially those MBAs whose knowledge of productive work is at best theoretical. R.I.P., Admiral Hopper; we miss you.

2 Bryan { 12.10.06 at 9:58 am }

There are tapes of some of her lectures and she was a really good speaker because she could demystify computers and the processes.

That quote is a direct shot across Robert McNamara’a “bow” and his attempts to make the Department of Defense run like a “business”.

3 Karen { 12.10.06 at 11:13 am }

Being a Tech-no-dweeb sometimes has its drawbacks… Like I’d nevah heard of Grace Hopper (though I have heard of COBAL). Most interesting and thanks for the info…where do you find these taped lectures?

4 Bryan { 12.10.06 at 12:52 pm }

She gave them as part of a Defense Department/Navy lecture series which is how I saw them, but there was nothing classified in the presentations. I would hope that they would be publicly available at some point, because they are an excellent way of introducing computer concepts to students.

If you were there at the beginning what computers do isn’t terribly complicated. It becomes overwhelming when you jump into the middle, right now, when those simple operations are done in nanoseconds by millions of electronic switches operating in concert. Originally the switches were relays, which were replaced by vacuum tubes, which were replaced by transistors. Then the transistors were miniaturized and put on “chips”. If you had the space and the people you could “build” a modern microprocessor with light switches and people.

5 Scorpio { 12.10.06 at 5:46 pm }

Admiral Grace made it possible for a lot of people to be programmers, probably me included.

Being between jobs, I’ll testify that finding something in Cobol is really hard now.

6 Bryan { 12.10.06 at 7:25 pm }

There was a time when Cobol and CICS was a guarantee of a job, now a lot of the code is punched in India. The jobs are in the Fortune 500 and government, both of which have been struck by the outsourcing disease without understanding that they are turning the control of their corporate lives over to people with no stake in the success of the corporation.

I’ve worked in machine language and assembler on a lot of systems, big and small, and it’s time consuming and error prone. Without compiled languages there would have been no “computer revolution.”

Good luck on the job front. I wish I could point you to a source, but I live out in the sticks these days and most of my “network” have retired, a few even did it by choice.