Grace Hopper Lecture on HackerTube: recommended by 1 Hacker News commenter across 1 month, 2017–2026.
lecture · evergreen
A lecture by Commodore Grace Hopper on the future of computing, posted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes her well-known nanosecond wire demonstration and humorous comparisons of device latencies.
Cited for her vivid illustration of orders of magnitude in latency, and as an example of a great computing pioneer as teacher.
“With good humour she gives a example of what various devices' latency are”
4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
Hard to believe there are 124 comments here and nobody has brought up Grace Hopper's talk[0][1] yet. With good humour she gives a example of what various devices' latency are, and a simple tool to comprehend the cost and orders of magnitude. [0] short - [link] [1] long - ▶ this video
in “How much your computer can do in a second” · View on HN
Excellent work, glinscott. Thank you for sharing! I am about to send this to all my pals who are parents to schoolkids (um, and also pals who are still, like me, basically a schoolkid :p XD). Building things up from first principles, and ideally also tactile / visceral examples, is my absolute favourite genre of explanations. Alas, a rarefied genre, because it is so much harder to do well (without doing disservice to the learner's intellect and ability) than expert talking to (presumed) expert. So thanks for contributing to it. People like George Polya [0], Richard Feynman [1], Grace Hopper [2] are exemplars of this tradition. [0] [link] [1] [link] [2] ▶ this video (And I too try in my own meagre way through my blog and source code, albeit it's all plain text because visual explainers, animated ones that too are ridiculously difficult. So I have some idea of how much of a labour of love your piece is. <Claps hands, Whistles, Doffs hat>.)
in “The Beam Engine” · View on HN
> Light is slow, not exactly 1 foot per nanosecond but it's a reasonable mnemonic. "Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond" is a good illustration of this (segment is only 2m): * [link] * [link] Full lecture: * ▶ this video
in “I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]” · View on HN
>Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that the Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring such marginal areas as multilingual programming. This is not at all the impression given by Grace. Also, I'll note this explanation makes no logical sense given that it was the first demo to management of something that management had already told Grace she wouldn't be able to do at all. If they were concerned at the waste of time and energy, they would presumably have stopped her when they believed that what she was working on was never going to work, rather than requesting the removal of a feature that had been implemented in the first demo. Here is Grace's take on it, from her MIT lecture - 'We'd like to run this German program for you...' Have you figured out what happened to us? That thing hit the fan. It was absolutely obvious, that a respectable American computer, built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could not understand French or German. And I had to spend the next four months saying no, no, no, no, no, no! We wouldn't think of programming it in anything but English. She starts the topic at around 59 minutes - ▶ this video edit - I just checked the dates. Never mind logical sense, the explanation fails chronological sense. Her demo was in 1952 and she became the very first director of Eckert–Mauchly's newly formed Department of Automatic Programming, sometime in 1954. They definitely were not worried about time and energy bei
in “Welsh Wikipedia gives me hope” · View on HN