Microsoft Word Hopper Grace oral history. 1980. 102702026. final doc

 

 

CHM Ref: 

X5142.2009

                    © 1980 Computer History Museum                           Page 

18

 of 54

 

 

 

 

Dick, I want you to hear the Raytheon guy, because if they’ve got something in storing modules 

and constructing programs out of it.  

Burdette:  

Yeah, sure. I want to hear that. We’re working on that too. The University of 

Kansas is involved in it. 

Pantages:  

There’s a lot of working going on in modular package development, isn’t there?  

Hopper:  

Oh, going back to the beginning of compilers. You know what the big failure was? 

Those of us who learned in the beginning to do modular programming and everything never 

passed it on. We were too busy getting programs on the computers. By the time we got around 

to it they had the big memories and they were splurging everything all over the place. Then we 

had to back off and invent modules. 

Burdette:  

Are you talking about subroutines? 

Hopper:  

Macros, whatever you call them. Modules. 

Burdette:  

They can be done with models too. 

Hopper:  

I think they’ve really got something. [Raytheon] will be here the 17

th

. 

Burdette:  

I’m going up to U. Penn, Moore School, to look at Model 2, which we’ve got them 

working on for us. Model 2 is in this area, non-procedural language, which sort of 

models…We’ve looked into FOCUS.  

Our position is that it’s fine as long as you do it in a controlled environment. So we can see what 

it’s like and then can evaluate it properly before they try to decide to do an entire system that is 

going to be at 85 sites. They want to go ahead and do it right now without proper evaluation.  

[The Burdette conversation ends here.] 

The Murray Siblings: Brilliant Communicators 

Hopper on phone: I can’t. I start traveling again. I begin the fifth of January. I’ll be gone from 

then on. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 

 Pantages:  

I know I have to let you go. We got caught somewhere between Eckert and 

Mauchly and the future.  

---

 

 

CHM Ref: 

X5142.2009

                    © 1980 Computer History Museum                           Page 

19

 of 54

 

 

 

 

Hopper:   

Any day is a bad day. This was a better day. Next Monday. Tuesday I have to be 

at CODASYL. 

Pantages:  

To give you an idea of what I know about your role in this industry: inventor, 

implementer, leader of standardization, educator and communicator, visionary. There is no 

beginning and end with you.  

Hopper:  

If you talk with my brother you’d find the same thing. When he graduated with 

me, he went to Banker’s Trust. He started to get his doctorate, completed it just before WW II 

broke out. He entered the Army under the draft because he couldn’t get past the physical to 

become an officer because he has eyes that have a blank spot. He was ordered up to the 

airfield up there. …And the sergeant that was writing the colonel’s reports, he helped the 

sergeant. The colonel found out he had a doctorate in economy. So he was sent off to OCS and 

he was commissioned and eventually worked for Hap Arnold. He wrote the whole plan for the 

military and transport service for what they would do when the war was over.  He went to [a] 

bank where he became a vice president. He found that he was more interested in teaching. He 

retired early, but the bank set up a Sloan School professorship at the graduate school of 

business and made him the Sloan professor of finance. He also started lecturing all over the 

place. 

Pantages:  

What was his name?  

Hopper:  

Roger Fletcher Murray. He lectured all over the world. He was an expert on 

pensions. He retired at 65 but he’s still all over making speeches. I think we are one of the only 

pairs of sister and brother, both of whom received the Legion of Merit in the military, and 

received honorary doctorates and have doctorate degrees…and everything else. 

And my sister Mary, during the war, she had small children so of course, she ran the nursery 

school at a plant at Bloomfield for all the women that came to work during the war. She had a 

double major too, and after the boys were off to high school, off she went to become a 

statistician for an insurance company. There were three of us, not one. All of us had the ability 

to get up and talk. It must have been in our background. 

[Late in December, we resumed the interview by phone.]  

Common Sense and Distributed Computing 

Pantages:  

I have been talking to people about you and you were incredible in a lot of ways, 

but there’s one way in particular—and that is that you have not changed, Grace. Your character, 

your attitude, your personality… 

---

 

 

CHM Ref: 

X5142.2009

                    © 1980 Computer History Museum                           Page 

20

 of 54

 

 

 

 

Hopper:  

Except that I am always after something new. 

Pantages:  

[Laughter] Well, that’s one of the characteristics that has never changed.  

Hopper:  

One thing is that people try to make me something extra. I think they’ve failed to 

realize that everything I’ve done, the so-called big accomplishments – like writing the first 

compiler and starting the business about distributed computing and all of that. They totally fail to 

realize that everything I’ve ever done was not genius effect.  It was all straightforward common 

sense at the time: how can you get this done?  

Pantages:  

But it was also the fact that you were capable of recognizing it. 

Hopper:  

I think I always looked for the easiest and best, most accurate way of getting 

something done. I don’t use high-level theory. I use very basic common sense – the whole 

original concept of the compiler is the most common sense thing I ever heard of. And I’ve 

always said that if I hadn’t done it, somebody else was bound to sooner or later. It was so 

common sense that it had to be done. 

The same thing with the question of using parallel computers. We’re getting more and more 

information and everybody wants it faster and faster, and you’re obviously not going to do it with 

one computer. You have to build a system of computers.  

I think that’s the failure, the inability to recognize the need for constant use of common sense. 

Most people don’t use it; they try to use some kind of a theory. I think they don’t look at what the 

problem is and what’s the easiest way of fixing it. And then you have the second part of the job, 

which is to persuade someone else that they need it and to spend the money to get it.  

As I watch people try to get things, they try to sell everything. That’s not the way to do it; what 

you do is figure out why the other guy needs it and then you tell him that. You leave yourself 

out; you explain to that guy why he needs it, why it is good for the company, if he sponsors this 

he might get to be manager or vice president.  

Pantages:  

That sounds simple. 

Hopper:  

Well, people don’t look at other people and what are his interests and what he 

cares about and talk to that rather than what they think. They are so wound up in themselves 

and what magnificent idea they’ve just gotten. So when you come down to it, the answer is I’ve 

always been extremely practical. 

Pantages:  

You started talking about small systems. Jack Jones, I talked to him yesterday, 

and he said that in his thesis on automatic coding in 1953 or 1954, he quoted you on the 

---