I’ve been slowly listening my way through the recently released “lost” lecture from then-Capt. Grace Hopper entitled “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People” from 1982. I didn’t read much in advance about the content of the lecture, just decided to watch it as an interesting piece of history. It’s a very engaging and funny talk – about 8 minutes in I had to pause and go back and start listening again more closely.
Her main opening premise:
“I’m afraid we will continue to buy pieces of hardware and then put programs on them, when what we should be doing is looking at the underlying thing, which is the total flow of information to any organization, activity, company, or what have you. We should be looking at the information flow and then selecting the computers to implement that information flow. Now, of course, if we do that one of the first things we’ll need to know is something about the value of the information we’re processing.”
“No work, no research, has been done on the value of information. We’ve completely failed to look at it. And yet it’s going to make a tremendous difference in how we run our computer systems of the future. Because if there are two things that are dead sure, I don’t even have to call them predictions, one is that the amount of data and the amount of information will continue to increase. And it’s more than linear. And the other is the demand for instance access to that information will increase. And those two are in conflict. We’ve got to know something about the value of the information being processed.”
Many of the examples are dated to older, slower technology with lower bandwidth, where the main question is what information to keep on-line or not. But the bigger picture theme that organizations need to understand the the value of their information is still relevant, as is the associated theme that organizational needs and usage need to be understood to create useful systems.
From there, she also makes the case that we need to continue advancing the speed of our computers in order to solve vital problems like predicting the weather to improve agriculture or managing water supplies to support a growing population. She has a lovely physical illustration of the limitations on how far we can continue to speed up our computers and a common sense argument for distributed computing based on the observation that long ago, if you wanted to move a log that was to heavy for your ox, you “didn’t try to grow a bigger ox. [You use] two oxen.” In the second half of the talk, she does a similarly clear, common sense job presenting some still fundamental security ideas, like modularity, to protect that information that we need to be understanding the value of.
A favorite bit, as someone who likes to think I sometimes haunt my graduated students:
“I think the saddest phrase I ever hear in a computer installation is that horrible one “but we’ve always done it that way.” That’s a forbidden phrase in my office. To emphasize the fact, I keep a clock that operates entirely counterclockwise. Now the first day people meet it they can’t tell time. By the second they discover what used to be ten of is now ten after, they can tell time again. Normally it’s not until the third day that they recognize that there was never any reason why clocks should run clockwise. They could just as well have run counterclockwise. […] Hopefully I’ll give you each one of you a very small gift. I will promise you something. If during the next twelve months any one of you says “but we’ve always done it that way” I will instantly materialize beside you and I will haunt you for 24 hours and see if I can get you to think again. And I know it works – I’ve already had over 70 letters thanking me for haunting people.”
The length of the two parts together is daunting but I definitely recommend checking it out. She’s a phenomenal storyteller and its worth it to get to the end of the second half where she talks about being called out of retirement to get the entire Navy standardized around the same version of COBOL and her pirate flag.