When I was a Data Processing Technician 3rd Class in 1986 she spoke at a conference in Virginia Beach. All the seats where taken by senior officers. She walked in and asked the officers to stand up because she wanted "her" Data Processors to sit down front. I still have one of her nano seconds. Almost 40 years later I am still working in the computer field and always remember her speech as one of the things that inspired me to stay in the Navy and to continue with Information Systems as a career.
NSA just published an internal lecture by Grace Hopper from the 80's, right here on youtube. It felt like time travel and her great personality was on full display.
No one can believe that this HUGE legend was packed in such a tiny frame!!. She is to programmers (now known as coders), what Henry Ford is to cars. RIP RADML Grace Hopper! May your name lives forevermore in the vastness of the Internet.
I retired from the Navy and knew of Adm Hopper, but had no idea she appeared on Letterman. This 9 and a half minute video was one of the most enjoyable I've ever seen, and makes me proud to have worn the same uniform she did. What a brilliant mind she was.
I had the honor meeting the Admiral in the 80s. She delivered a speech to Memorex Computer Technology Symposium. I was impressed with her knowledge, and command of speech and the audience. Go Navy!
When I was in my early 30's, about 40 years ago, I had the privilege of actually meeting and talking to this brilliant woman. She was the guest speaker at our local DPMA (Data Processing Management Association) meeting in Greenville SC. She gave everyone a short piece of wire that represented how far light travels in a nanosecond. I kept that piece of wire for 20+ years and always thought about what she did for information technology. I'm retired now, but spent 40+ years in Information Technology.
I'd frame that wire on a nice velvet background with a little engraved brass plaque at the bottom saying 'One Nanosecond' Courtesy of RAdm Grace Hopper and the date. What an honor!
She's far from ordinary. But yes, most of ordinary guests are way more interesting than whatever nepotism child, Hollywood bimbo he has on promoting her latest fragrance, or celebrity beefcake movie star is there to promote whatever garbage superhero movie they have coming out.
I'll second the "far from ordinary" comment. Grace Hopper is still honored to this day with several conferences named after her....as well as one of the institutions of Yale named after her....and a Navy ship, the USS Hopper is named for her too!
I wasn’t trying to imply that Grace Hopper isn’t accomplished or skilled. I’m saying that Dave always made an effort to feature people other than Hollywood celebrities on his show and utilized his own celebrity to help increase the number of people who are aware of them and their contributions. Grace Hopper remains quite humble throughout this interview. It is Dave who keeps on pointing out her accomplishments as extraordinary.
@@kstepko Understood and very true! Dave never kissed up to the Hollywood types anyway. He was always more into the regular everyday people. My comments were more meant for anyone who finds the thread and may not have known who Grace was.
Especially our military who never get put on TV unless it's for something heroic or like this woman did which really is phenomenal considering she was 37 in 1944 she had to be in her early 80s by this time.
It wasnt mentioned that she discovered the first computer "bug". One time the computer crashed and they had to find out why. Now, back then computers had tubes, big glass tubes (transistors didnt exist yet), so they looked and looked and finally found out that a moth, being attracted to the light of the tube had made contact with it and burned, thus shorting it out. She found the moth, which is now in a museum and since then, anything which causes a computer to make an error or crash, is called a "bug" and the process of finding it is called "debugging" the computer (could be in the software as well). It was so exciting for me to finally see her, live and talking.
this is actually not true. the first concept of computer (as a calculation machine) as was already created in the late midages, but it failed because back then they coudnt assemble so many wooden gears. but besides that, computer is also title for a person who did calculations
@@gregh5061The first electronic computer was probably the one built in the UK at Bletchley Park during WW2. It was used to crack German communications codes. It's said that the work done at Bletchley Park shortened the war by two year.
@@VictorianDad Grace Hopper's main contribution isn't inventing the modern computer, it was creating the world's first compiler, way back in 1952, plus co-developing COBOL.
What a legend! No idea how I missed this episode of Letterman back in the day. I was a batch COBOL programmer at the start of my career. One of the most elusive software bugs to find was a missing period.
COBOL, wow! Ancient history. Did you write on hollerith cards and submit your program on a tray to the operator for processing? 😄 When I started, I programmed in RPGIII on an AS400. Ancient times, indeed.
@@Frankincensedjb123 Our providing systems were pretty advanced - we submitted jobs in batch with JCL. (Job Control Language) We did have some paper tape readers though. I also programmed in RPG and Assembler but moved over to mini computer (desktop) programming against the advice of my manager. He said there was no future in desktop computing. 😁
@@Frankincensedjb123 Not so ancient history. Still hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL running with 40% of existing banking systems built on it. Used quite a bit still in the insurance industry as well. No one wants to pay to rewrite all those systems.
I'm curious. We used DEC equipment at the data center where I worked. Because it was Bell System, we used UNIX and DEC PDP-11s, the same minicomputer on which UNIX was created and developed. I loved that equipment and always wondered what happened to DEC. Thanks for the history lesson.
DEC was actually a big deal. They built the PDP-7 and PDP-11 mini computers which were very important in the 70s. In fact, the operating system "Unix" was originally built for the PDP machines, and basically any device that's not running Windows can trace it's software lineage back to Unix. It's fairly unsurprising that Hopper would have been working at DEC, because both she and DEC were the top of the industry. (Hopper was not a part of Unix, however. Those engineers are legends in their own rights.)
And to this very day, HP still supports OpenVMS which is the OS that originally ran on the VAX11 / 750 / 780. To clarify some of the replies, , PDP computers did not run UNIX, they either ran RT11 or RSX. RT11 was for real-time applications whereas RSX was for traditional computing
In another video RADL Hopper explained how the term ‘computer bug’ came to be: the MARK1 went down and they opened it up to see if one of the vacuum tubes had shorted out and found a large moth had shorted one of the contacts. They removed the moth and taped it into the logbook. This the term computer bug came to describe software errors. What an amazingly brilliant and humorous person she was.
Grace is STILL honored today with conferences and events named in her honor....a navy ship named after her....and I think one of the schools of Yale is also named after her.
I've been a computer geek since I was a kid, and have read about Grace, but never seen any videos of her. Such a charming person! The computer owes her a lot!
I remember this Letterman episode, and I remember the earlier 60 Minutes interview that Morley Safer did with her. Safer asked her (Ph. D., Math) if women were better than men at mathematics. 'No, about the same,' I believe was her reply.
Hey Letterman staff. Thanks for all the uploads. If you're pulling from the original tapes you should consider deinterlacing everything to double the framerate. That way no data would be lost and it'd be a great RU-vid archive copy.
I had just started working at DEC (the Digital Equipment Corporation she plugs at the beginning of the interview :-) ) when I saw this air. She is amazing, and also this reminds me of how good Dave is at interviewing. Quick-witted and genuinely interested in what his guests had to say.
For anybody 37 learning computers for the first time, is a task. Now be 37 and learn the first computer so well that you can write a manual for other people to be able to use that computer. That is amazing. What an amazing woman. The experiences she had in her life, truly awe inspiring.
Very true. I’m a 44-year old software engineer, and learning new concepts gets more difficult as you age. Your brain elasticity isn’t nearly what it was in your teens and 20s. She is amazing.
This was the night before I went off to boot camp. I had never forgotten what she said about sleep when you can and course that night I couldn’t sleep. Almost 38 years later I can watch this segment again. Wow!!!
Whoa! Had no idea she was a guest on Letterman, what a cool clip to share with classrooms! Could have used this in my digital course presentation last year.
The National Security Agency has a RU-vid channel, and they have videos of several of her lectures. They are absolutely brilliant, and still completely relevant and eye opening today. Highly highly recommended!
I noticed that. I think the names and sizes of all the tiny fractions and large multiples were kinda being standardized during her time, so I'll forgive her for the errors.
Such an amazing person, esp given how much she achieved when it was almost unheard of for women to do so at the time. As a computer geek I learned of her early on and more than once had punch cards in the "hopper." RIP
She is 100% right about needing a course for civilian transition from the military. There needs to be A LOT more resources dedicated to that, as well as better-funded, continual support in the years after. Especially if they have seen active combat. I wish I could have met this woman. She's a treat.
Why isn't she more known!!? There are so many women who were in male dominated (ONLY) fields yet no one learns about them school. That does a disservice to what they had to go through and their courage. Not only that, but they succeeded anyway. Grace Hopper is an incredible woman who is real pioneer in computers. That was/is incredible about David Letterman. He interviewed/interviews incredible, interesting and remarkable people who aren't famous or wealthy.
She actually didn't have to go through too much of anything, or at least not anything more than an average male student goes through today. The first "computers", as they were actually called, were just women who were really good at math. After that, machine computers were initially programmed and operated primarily by women like Grace. And also like her, many other women created the first programming languages and software. The whole industry, in the software, programming, and maintenance areas, was staffed and run primarily by women, and it stayed that way for several decades, until men started entering the field far more in the 1970s. It only became a field staffed and run primarily by men at some point before 1990. And the decline in women in that field has been sharp ever since, perhaps because women began to see it more and more as a male "dominated" field and don't know the history of it.
@@Ahjile The big shift in demographics was due to the rise of PCs. Before that, the level of experience for people entering the field was fairly equal. When families started buying them in mass, most only had one and they were arrogantly seen as a "mans" domain. The young men who grew up with them at home then outpaced the women in college who came in with less experience. In spite of the near ubiquity of "computers" nowadays, that disparity hasn't closed all that much. Although it started with PCs, the perpetuation of other cultural "norms" continues to sustain it. Given the prominence of women in the field from the very beginning, that's quite unfortunate. Movies like _Hidden Figures_ are starting to set the record straight.
Some trivia about this marvelous human individual.... In an interview with Peter Gzowsky in Canada, she shared that she and her team coined the expression. COMPUTER BUG.... She said that in the 1940's computers used lamps (tube) and one lamps burned because a moth landed on a tube .... It was the first "Computer But".👍🏻
I've heard this story a few times in various forms over the years, originally when I was in the Navy over 40 years ago working for the division of nuclear reactors. One of the early computers she was working with would sometime breakdown because insects [mostly moths] would get into the equipment racks and short things out. One day when she and an assistant had the computer opened up and they were removing dead moths and making repairs someone walked by and asked them what they were doing. One or the other replied they were "debugging the computer" and that is the origin of the term. Hopper came up with the idea that instead of programming a computer in machine language, basically the numbers that make up the instruction set of the computer, that there should be a program that turned English language statements and formulas into machine language. What we now know as compilers. She also developed the COBOL programming language.
I consider myself part of the third generation of computer science. Grace was 1st Generation. She taught some of my teachers -- the second generation. That shows just how recently computers were actually developed.
I don't know much, but I'm pretty sure that without Rear Admiral Hopper, the evolution of computers would not be where they are today. Side note: She was part of the team that found the first literal computer bug, a moth stuck inside the electronics of the Harvard MK II Computer. Dave did a good job helping draw her out and letting her be naturally funny.
@@marksasahara1115 She is definitely a legend. Thanks for the info. Amazing how they first programmed in machine language (if you want to call it that) by flipping switches. When we booted the UNIX PDP-11s on the job in the 1980s we were still flipping switches. LOL
It's funny that she said she had to write a book. My aunt Violet Confer was in the Army for 50 years, and joined at the same time. She had to compile/maintain a book of all the specs of every computer IN THE WORLD. At first it was small. The last edition was in the early '60s, and it had become a 3-inch-thick book. If she was alive she'd tell you the Army had the first computer. The ENIAC was funded by the Army, and it was at Ballistic Research in Maryland where she worked. But that topic always has asterisks re: the definition of computer. I wish I could've asked if they knew each other. I'm sure they met. The military computers in the '40s, the Apollo computer in the '60s, and the Cray supercomputers in the '80s all had small groups of mostly women doing a lot of the work.
