A truly brilliant analysis of #foresight from renowned computer scientist and mathematician, Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, in a recently released 1982 lecture to the National Security Agency:
“Along came a gentleman named Henry Ford with two concepts: standard interchangeable parts and an assembly line, and he started to build Model Ts. I think we’ve totally forgotten how tremendously that changed the world.
You could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black, they cost between three hundred and six hundred dollars, and people started to own cars. Naturally, had once they had cars, they demanded roads, we built them. Gas stations appeared, garages were stocked with interchangeable parts… People found they could move to suburbs and drive to work – and then of course they wanted to shop near home, so we had to build shopping centers. I think we’ve forgotten the tremendous developments that followed from the Model T Ford.
Now, whether you recognize it or not, the Model Ts of the computer industry are here. We’ve been through the preliminaries of the industry – we’re now at the beginning of what will be the largest industry in the United States, and I’m quite worried about something.
When we built all those roads and the shopping centers and all the other things, and provided for automobile transportation, we forgot something. We forgot transportation as a whole. We only looked at the automobiles.
Because of that, today, when we need them again, the road beds, the railroads are falling apart… If we wanted to move our tanks from the center of the country to the ports to shipped them overseas, there are no flat cars left because we move all the cars on those racks on the roads now. If we wanted to move coal to replace oil, there are probably not enough hopper cars to move both the grain crop and the coal – and the truth of the matter is we’ve done a lousy job of managing transportation as a whole.
Now, as we come to the world of the microcomputer, I think we’re going to be facing the same possibility. 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.”
Watch the full video, titled "Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People,” below👇