NARA recovers famed 1982 Grace Hopper lecture recorded on obsolete media format

I know that NTSC was crap, but that doesn’t look sharp enough to be broadcast quality.

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I highly recommend taking the time to watch these videos. Grace Hopper has a lot to say that’s completely relevant and she’s hilariously funny. What a treasure.

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… though that little factoid is disputed

debugging computer science GIF

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The first 5 minutes discussing the changes that technology has made on society is fascinating to hear from someone who saw it first hand. And of course she was right about the parallels of computers and the Model-T. Maybe more right than she knew.

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I always got the impression Admiral Hopper was the best teacher and mentor imaginable - smart, patient and - as you say - funny. But she’d be the sort of teacher you knew to not to cross.

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Ampex Type C was. The camera the NSA used may not have been.

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African or European?

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My ex was in NOAA and he came back from a conference and told me “I had lunch with God” … he was in the data processing end of it and they assigned him to play aide de camp and gofer for her during the conference.

He was SO HAPPY!

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My mother (b. 1933) was a math teacher and taught college-level computer science for a bit when there weren’t many CS specialists.

She saw Grace Hopper speak and came home with the gift of a “nanosecond” that she proudly showed off for the rest of her life.

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COBOL was a team effort by CODASYL under the direction of Hopper, but if we’re picking nits, the need for a common portable language was identified by Hawes, who proposed the idea to Hopper.

So even if it wasn’t Hopper alone, it was the women who had to do real work on computers of the time who said “there must be a better way to do this!”

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Wasn’t me. Not sure why you felt the need to point out something I did not say or do. :woman_shrugging:

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One of my professors in college came to class one day and handed out nanoseconds to everyone in the class. He then went on to talk about Grace Hopper at length and explained her influence on the entire field. It’s one of those “I still remember the details” lectures, and I still have that nanosecond 45 years later.

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It’s a simplification. She led the team that designed FLOW-MATIC, an earlier programming language that greatly influenced the design of COBOL. But FLOW-MATIC has gone extinct, but COBOL is still with us thanks to decades-old codebases still in use.

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