Grace Hopper Quotes

A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.

It is better to beg forgiveness, than ask permission.

Leadership is a two-way street, loyalty up and loyalty down." (CBS 60 Minutes interview, March 6, 1983)

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.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.

The most dangerous phrase in the language is we've always done

Wouldn’t it be dull to do things that ended?

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

The most dangerous phrase in the language is, ‘We’ve always done it this way.

By 1940 Grace Hopper was bored. She had no children, her marriage was unexciting, and teaching math was not as fulfilling as she had hoped.

Grace Hopper develops first computer compiler.

As she [Grace Hopper] told a historian is 1968, to make the link between "the computer people" and the outside world of clients, problems, and possible applications, "you needed people with more vocabularies

Despite its reputation as a discipline for introverted perfectionists, social skills are valuable in programming-even essential. Grace Hopper understood this, and it's her early self education in a wide range of nontechnical fields that made her such a profoundly competent programmer.

Finally, leaders focus on people. In the words of Grace Murray Hopper, computer scientist and rear admiral in the US Navy, “You manage things; you lead people.” Naturally,

Machine problems, called bugs, were very often caused by fraying of the brushes on the counters, which caused them to spark. When this happened, the operators would go to Hopper and borrow the little mirror from the handbag she always had with her. Then they turned the lights off and held the mirror down into the machinery to locate where the counters were sparking.

It was warm in the summer of 1945; the windows were always open and the screens were not very good. One day the Mark II stopped when a relay failed. They finally found the cause of the failure: inside one of the relays, beaten to death by the contacts, was a moth. The operator carefully fished it out with tweezers, taped it in the logbook, and wrote under it “first actual bug found.

Turing was offered a choice: imprisonment or probation contingent on receiving hormone treatments via injections of a synthetic estrogen designed to curb his sexual desires, as if he were a chemically controlled machine. He chose the latter, which he endured for a year. Turing at first seemed to take it all in stride, but on June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by biting into an apple he had laced with cyanide. His friends noted that he had always been fascinated by the scene in Snow White in which the Wicked Queen dips an apple into a poisonous brew. He was found in his bed with froth around his mouth, cyanide in his system, and a half-eaten apple by his side. Was that something a machine would have done? I. Stirling’s formula, which approximates the value of the factorial of a number. II. The display and explanations of the Mark I at Harvard’s science center made no mention of Grace Hopper nor pictured any women until 2014, when the display was revised to highlight her role and that of the programmers. III. Von Neumann was successful in this. The plutonium implosion design would result in the first detonation of an atomic device, the Trinity test, in July 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and it would be used for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, three days after the uranium bomb was used on Hiroshima. With his hatred of both the Nazis and the Russian-backed communists, von Neumann became a vocal proponent of atomic weaponry.

In pioneer days they used oxen for heavy pulling, and when one ox couldn’t budge a log, they didn’t try to grow a larger ox. We shouldn’t be trying for bigger computers, but for more systems of computers. — Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper: "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

You manage things, you lead people.

This is it,” said Dad. “Grace Brewster Murray Hopper Hall.” They wound their way upstairs and down long hallways to a door that said MATH LAB. “Here we are!” said Dad. A girl with green eyes and a messy ponytail greeted them. “You must be the Moodys.” “I’m Richard Moody, and this is my daughter, Judy,” said Dad. “Hi, I’m Chloe. Chloe Canfield. My friends call me C-squared, since my name has two Cs and I go to CC. You know, C to the second power, ’cause I’m into math?” “That’s funny,” said Dad, shaking her hand. “I don’t get it,” said Judy.

In 1951, Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician with the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance Naval Reserve, conceived of a program called a compiler, which translated a programmer’s instructions into the strings of ones and zeroes, or machine language, that ultimately controlled the computer. In principle, compilers seemed just the thing to free programmers from the tyranny of hardware and the mind-numbing binary code. Hopper

Hopper’s thrust was always to simplify and to demystify. She reserved some of her most cutting remarks for those who insisted that only an expert in writing machine code could run a machine; she had no time for programmers who saw themselves as high priests standing between computers and the public.46

Failing to get institutional support, Hopper continued working on building a data processing compiler on her own. “When you have a good idea,” she loved to tell audiences, “and you’ve tried it and you know it’s going to work, go ahead and do it—because it’s much easier to apologize afterwards than it is to get permission.

During World War II, the United States manufactured approximately 45 percent of all armaments produced by all parties engaged in the conflict. Scientists and technicians worked at a feverish rate on the design, testing, modification, and analysis of these weapons, and their efforts required extensive numerical calculations. Trained specialists—usually women called “computers”—produced many of the numbers, using desk calculators. The time required to solve a problem this way was often expressed in “girl hours.

From then on, whenever Aiken put his head through the door and asked if they were making numbers, if they were not, they would tell him they were debugging the computer, a term and a procedure they may have been the first to institutionalize.

Brendel also remembered a Christmas party, Christmas 1944, when the commander actually relaxed for a while and sat drinking with a group on the floor. He dared her to drink a water glass full of bourbon. She was dogged enough and angry enough with him that she did, and then walked home with Harry Goheen. “I wasn’t drunk,” Brendel insisted fifty years later, “I didn’t pass out. I’ll show you that picture. I don’t know that you can tell.

Harvard generally frowned on Aiken’s postwar activities, however, including his close ties with industry, and ultimately the continual struggle for funding drove him to retire from the university at the minimum age in 1961. When he died suddenly at a conference in March 1973 at the age of seventy-three, Aiken left a generous bequest to Harvard. His generosity was not reciprocated. In spring 2000 the new Maxwell Dworkin computer sciences building was ceremonially inaugurated at the northeast corner of Harvard University’s Holmes Field, formerly the site of the Aiken Computation Laboratory. The new building was a gift to the university from Bill Gates and his Microsoft associate and Harvard classmate Steven Ballmer. Instead of continuing to honor the name of Howard Hathaway Aiken, founder of Harvard’s trailblazing computing program, the new center was named for the mothers of the two recent benefactors. A bronze plaque on the wall of the building is all that remains today to remind of Aiken’s original inspiration. Recently a conference room at the computer center was named for Grace Hopper.

She further claimed that she could make a computer do anything she could completely define. This announcement was met with great skepticism, but of course she was right.39 Hopper foresaw no end to the education of her computer. She told her colleagues that at present the UNIVAC had “a well grounded mathematical education fully equivalent to that of a college sophomore.” Moreover, the computer neither forgot nor made mistakes. It was making good progress in its undergraduate studies and was well on the way to graduation. “It is inevitable,” Hopper wrote, “that it will present itself as a candidate for a graduate degree.

After a few months she turned to her brother in frustration and he found the problem: every now and then she had used octal when figuring her balance. Hopper realized that she could not work in octal all day and then live in a normal decimal world the rest of the time. Her answer was not that she should learn octal better, but that the computer should learn decimal. At this point the germ of an idea came to her to let the machine do the dirty work; she would instruct it in her own language.

Everybody liked Grace and she liked everybody,” she said. Hopper also had “an eye for the young men,” as Brendel put it. Everyone knew Hopper was separated or recently divorced and had no commitments. At one point Brendel and the others thought Hopper and a certain navy captain “were going to be an item,” but in the end “they weren’t.

«Antes de la segunda guerra mundial la vida era sencilla. Después ya teníamos sistemas.» Grace Hopper

For by grace you have been saved through faith….

The most dangerous phrase in the language is 'we've always done it this way

Another completely different way that the contacts of a relay could fail was if dirt or an insect got trapped in the spacing between contacts. If a fly or a moth, for example, happened to be sitting on the make contact when the coil was energized, then it could be squashed and, after its smashed little body dried, the contacts would be covered with a very disgusting but quite effective insulator. To clean up such a disabled relay was called debugging, a term that has survived in the vocabulary of modern computer users trying to fix their faulty programs. This is not a joke—I heard it as a quite serious story in a lecture at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1982 from a legend in computer science, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906–1992), a Yale PhD mathematician who worked during the Second World War with Harvard’s five ton, 800 cubic foot Mark I relay computer, which when operating was described as sounding like a “roomful of ladies knitting.” To debug such a machine must have been an “interesting” job for someone;

The most damaging phrase in the language is, 'it’s always been done that way.

It’s just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it's ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are 'naturals' at computer programming".

The other had come from that very same taiga gryphon. They'd been young and playing on a frozen lake. Both were adults with their hunting grounds. Both were new adults with their first hunting grounds. The taiga gryphon had seen her try to pounce a bog hopper and miss. The light snow had concealed the ice underneath, and Satra had gone sliding. The taiga gryphon's name was Mignet, but Satra hadn't known that yet. Satra heard the laughing and growled - well, squeaked, her voice giving out - a challenge. Mignet had flown down and landed daintily on the ice. She'd been beautiful, graceful. While taiga gryphons included several designs and shapes, she's been the one most strangers conjured up if asked to describe the taiga pride: white with black bars and rosettes. She was Satra's first, and only, crush.

when Grace [Hopper[ was an established figure in the new field of computer programming; she'd always assign the hardest jobs to the youngest and least experience members of her team. She figured they didn't have the sense to know what was impossible

The two connoisseurs congratulated each other, then Wingo returned to the Glicca. Professor Gill closed and locked the door. He placed the helmet on a counter. To right and left he arranged a golden candelabrum and reverently put flame to the orange candles. From the depths of a cabinet he brought a squat bottle and a goblet. He unsealed the bottle and poured a thick amber liquid into the goblet; then he pulled up a chair, settled himself to the joy of his acquisition. The universe had been opened to him; he was free to leave this frowsty little town of mad sprang-hoppers and, in dignity and pride, return to the cloisters of academia, where his wry anecdotes of life on Mariah would grace many an intimate little dinner party. Bliss!

Gildersleeve was directed to draw up the initial plans for a women’s naval force, although, as she expressed it later, “. . . if the Navy could possibly have used dogs or ducks or monkeys, certain of the older admirals would probably have greatly preferred them to women.

The most dangerous phrase in the language is, 'We've always done it that way!