15 Aug
2020
15 Aug
'20
7:44 p.m.
On 8/14/20, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
Wasn't it Grace Hopper who used to demonstrate a nanosecond by holding up
a foot of wire?
Yes. She gave a talk back in 1982 at DEC's software engineering
facility. She used the foot-long wire to illustrate a nanosecond and
a big coil of wire for a microsecond. After the talk she handed out
nanoseconds as souvenirs. I still have mine. Her talk was on the
future of computing, and the point she was making with the nanosecond
was that eventually there's a limit to Moore's Law., and any further
computational speedups would require parallelism. She drew an analogy
to the problem of a 19th century carter having to haul a load too
heavy for one horse. The solution isn't to breed bigger horses--it's
to hook up two of them. And here we are today, with multi-core
processors.
-Paul W.