9 Dec
2017
9 Dec
'17
11:31 p.m.
I attended a lecture by Admiral Hopper ca. 1981 at DEC's software
engineering facility in Nashua NH. She used the
micorsecond/nanosecond demonstration as part of a prediction of the
end of Moore's Law, and the eventual need for parallel processing to
make further gains in computing speed. She drew another analogy: in
the 19th century, if you wanted to haul a larger load, you didn't
breed bigger and bigger horses; you hitched up several horses as a
team. She was quite the visionary.
She handed out nanoseconds as souvenirs after the talk. I still treasure mine.
-Paul W.