Scientist Grace Hopper explains Nanoseconds

Google just honored Grace Hopper with a doodle and once you see her in action, you’ll know why.

Grace Hopper was an accomplished naval officer/computer scientist with a wry sense of humor and a down to earth style of communicating.

One of the first programmers on the Mark I Computer (IBM’s Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator or ASCC), Grace Hopper once described the Mark I as having ” 72 words of storage and could perform three additions a second.”

In comparison, the cell phone in your pocket has more computing power than NASA’s first moon launch, so if you are using your phone to send lol cats…. think about it.

It’s not the power, it’s what you do with it.

The early behemoths Hopper worked on were as large as 51 feet long and 8ft high. She also worked on Harvard’s Mark II and III computers as well as the UNIVAC I computer.

Affectionately known as “Grandma Cobol,” because she lead the team that invented COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language). She was one of the first computer scientists to campaign for “coding” as a computer language rather than strings of numbers. In many ways, that tendency defines Hopper. She had a no nonsense approach to computers that was eminently practical, always taking into account human nature and trying to find ways to make abstract concepts clear to the layman as well as the aspiring computer programmer.

One of the most famous Grandma Cobol stories was about the day her enormous computer was acting up. She traced the problem to a dead moth inside a sensitive area and was forced to debug the computer. The idea stuck and now we have computer bugs.

Here is Grace “Grandma Cobol”  Hopper explaining the the nanosecond.