Late Great Engineers: Grace Hopper – English speaking

A few years after her death, in 1994 the Reader’s Digest printed a pithy quotation attributed to Grace Hopper, revealing that she’d always been “more interested in the future than the past.” It’s a neat little phrase that probably most computer pioneers of the 20^th century will have uttered at some point. But it’s unlikely that any other than Hopper will have reminded themselves of the notion by having a clock on the wall running anti-clockwise. It may seem counter-intuitive to keep an eye on time running backwards when all you care about is the future, but Hopper’s reasoning was that it prompted her to remember that “humans are allergic to change. They love to say: ‘we’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that.” The brilliant, sharp-tongued and unconventional US Navy rear admiral who’d helped develop the first commercial electronic computer was, as former SVP at Apple Computer Jay Elliot once observed, ‘all Navy’ – “but when you reach inside, you find a pirate dying to be released.”