> "Now back in the early days of this country, when they moved heavy objects around, they didn't have any Caterpillar tractors, they didn't have any big cranes. They used oxen. And when they got a great big log on the ground, and one ox couldn't budge the darn thing, they did not try to grow a bigger ox. They used two oxen! And I think they're trying to tell us something. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not "get a bigger computer", it's "get another computer". Which of course, is what common sense would have told us to begin with."
This is a reaction to Grosch's Law, "Computing power increases as the square of the price".[1] In the early 1980s, people still believed that. Seymour Cray did. John McCarthy did when I was at Stanford around then. It didn't last into the era of microprocessors.
Amusingly, in the horse-powered era, once railroads started working, but trucks didn't work yet, there was a "last mile" problem - getting stuff from the railroad station or dock to the final destination. The 19th century solution was to develop a bigger breed of horse - the Shire Horse.[1]
The article you linked doesn't support your anecdote about the root of the Shire Horse. It describes their history dating back centuries before railways. Their biggest use seems to have been hauling material to and from ports, not trains.
Additionally, with early pioneer logging, another solution to avoiding having logs which are too large to handle was to not drop them in the first place.
In the Pacific Northwest, US, early loggers would leave the huge ones - to the point where pioneers could complain about a lack of available timber in an old-growth forest.
When the initial University of Washington was built, land-clearing costs were a huge portion of the overall capital spend. The largest trees on the site weren't used for anything productive; rather, they were climbed, chained together, and domino felled at the same time. By attaching the trees together, they only needed to fell one tree which brought the whole mess down into a pile and they burned it.
I think there's a lesson here about choosing which logs you want to move.
That "they didn't have any big cranes" forces the analogy in a way that breaks it. The solution wherever cranes are used is absolutely to get a bigger crane. And also, oxen were absolutely bred to be bigger. That's kind of the defining thing that distinguishes draft oxen from other kinds of cattle. But that process was limited by some factors that are peculiar to domesticated animals. And, of course, if you need to solve the problem right now, you make do with the current state of the art in farm animal technology.
Admiral Hopper's lecture wasn't delivered too long after 1976, which saw the release of both the CRAY-1 (single CPU) and the ILLIAC IV (parallel). ILLIAC IV, being more expensive, harder to use, and slower than the CRAY-1, was a promising hint at future possibility, but not particularly successful. Cray's quip on this subject was (paraphrasing) that he'd rather plow a field with one strong ox than $bignum chickens. Admiral Hopper was presumably responding to that.
What they both seem to miss is that the best tool for the job depends on both the job and the available tools. And they both seem to be completely missing that, if you know what you're doing, scale up and scale out are complementary: first you scale up the individual nodes as much as is practical, and then you start to scale out once scale up loses steam.
>And also, oxen were absolutely bred to be bigger. That's kind of the defining thing that distinguishes draft oxen from other kinds of cattle.
In your attempt to take down the analogy you just reinforced it. They quickly hit the limits of large oxen and had to scale up far faster than any selective breeding could help.
The exact same thing happened in computing even during the absolute hay day of Moore’s law. Workloads would very quickly hit the ceiling of a single server and the way to unblock yourself was not to wait for next gen chips but to parallelize.
Interestingly, there are cases where a “support crane” is made to lift crane components up to a higher altitude where a different “primary crane” can be to do the remainder of the heavy lifting. At that point the listing can theoretically be efficiently parallelized, with two items being able to be hoisted at any given moment.
Her analogy is in the context of her larger topic of systems of computers, and I think history has largely proven out her advocated approach. She highlights a case of trying to cram a multi-user time sharing system, security system, database and actual programs all onto a single large computer, and contrasts this with having a separate system managing multiple user access, a separate system managing the database, and individual systems managing each application. Which sounds a lot like a firewall/gateway + Postgres server + API server + reporting server + etc + etc setup that is pretty much the design of every major system I've worked on. Yes, to a small degree, we sort of cram these things back into a single box these days by way of virtualization, but it's pretty rare to see a system where everything is running on the same machine, under the same OS like Admiral Hopper would have been talking about at the time.
My favorite quote/story was "Never Never Never take the First No!" (16:20) because some people are just obstructionists and others just want to see how serious you are. As she says, appreciation for how to do this comes with age, but to me a good definition of management in general is learning if, when, how, and how much to pushback against pushback.
There’s an inflection point, however. Hence Seymour Cray’s famous quip, “If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?”
Well, if growing or breeding bigger oxen were as feasible as building bigger (mower powerful) computers was/is, perhaps people would take a different path?
In other words, perhaps the analogy is flawed?
These days, “get another computer” and “get a bigger computer” are basically the same thing; differences primarily residing in packaging and interconnects, but boy howdy can those interconnects make a difference.
Actually, humans have been doing exactly that through breeding over the millennia. They were just limited in their means.
This analogy has some "you wouldn't download a car!" vibes — sure I would, if it were practical (: And vertical scaling of computers is practical (up to some limits).
This is irrelevant to the example cited by Hopper. If you have a large log, you don't have time to breed a larger ox. You need to solve the problem with the oxen you have.
To an extent, but there's also a reason why beasts of burden didn't get to arbitrarily large sizes. Scaling has limits (particularly in this case both thermal limits and material strength limits).
Wow! This being released is wonderful and unexpected. I first heard about these tapes being found six weeks ago yet the NSA being unable to release them due to not having a suitable working 1-inch VTR machine (via this article: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/jul/10/grace-hop...)
That article was re-posted here on HN and elsewhere but didn't seem to get much attention and I feared the worst, since 1-inch magnetic video tape degrades with time. Very frustrating since such vintage VTRs do exist in working order in the hands of museums, video preservationists and collectors. Now six weeks later we get the best possible news! Hopefully, that article and the re-postings helped spread the word and someone in control of access to the tape got connected to someone with the gear.
And what an amazing piece of history to have preserved. I'm only ten minutes into the first tape but she's obviously a treasure - clear thinking, great communication and a sharp wit. Even captured here later in life you can clearly see why she was so successful and highly regarded by her peers (including some the most notable people in early computing history).
From the press release on the page[0] explains they got a machine from the National Archives. Though it probably would of been more fun if they directly cooperated with citizens of the public to decode the tapes.
>While NSA did not possess the equipment required to access the footage from the media format in which it was preserved, NSA deemed the footage to be of significant public interest and requested assistance from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to retrieve the footage. NARA’s Special Media Department was able to retrieve the footage contained on two 1’ APEX tapes and transferred the footage to NSA to be reviewed for public release.
"The National Archives and Records Administration has standard procedures and approved vendors for this.[1] One of their approved vendors, Colorlab, has 1" type C equipment. Colorlab is conveniently located just outside the Capitol Beltway, about 20 miles west of NSA HQ at Fort Meade. Colorlab does preservation and conversion work for the Library of Congress, Warner Bros., Universal, NBC, The New York Public Library, Paramount, HBO, etc. NARA has a standard form for government agencies requesting this service.[3] It looks like it's not even charged against the sending agency - Archives picks up the bill."[1]
A timeless piece of advice comes toward the end, where she describes all the smart, young professionals out there who are looking for positive leadership. It means respect those above and keep them informed, and look after your crew.
The zeitgeist of the time was shifting emphasis onto management (MBA type stuff) but the army had a saying; you can't manage a soldier into war, you lead them.
So it's interesting to know why people say what they do *when* (1982) they do. At 5:23 Rear Adm. Hopper says "they are dumping polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) around the country side".
Toxic waste was a highly relevant cultural phenomena at the time. I believe she was referencing the "Valley of the Drums" toxic waste site which was proposed as a superfund site in 12/82. Love Canal made the subject popular 5 years earlier.
For some reason I'm extremely interested in toxic waste. Anyways bit of reference.
> For some reason I'm extremely interested in toxic waste. Anyways bit of reference.
Toxic waste is a real life monster that make for the best horror stories. Fictional monsters as in creatures aint got shit on real life willful poisoning of entire communities causing the suffering and deaths of millions. And its all done intentionally because someone wants more money - greed. The real monsters take on a dual form - the head of the beast being the people responsible and the body being the invisible poisons carelessly tossed onto the earth. Makes lovecraft and others look like mickey mouse.
For anyone interested, this is far and away the best book I've read on the subject of toxic waste. It became rare over the past 5 years. Used to be available on Open Library but I think they received a DMCA. Even the NYC public library only has one copy located at the main branch. Library wouldn't let me loan it out.
You know, I find hard to enjoy fiction because I have read so much history.
The things that actually happened to real people, the things real people have done... they are just way more incredible and terrible than any one author is capable of dreaming up. The fact that they actually happened also gives them more heft...
This story[1] would have been in the news around that time as well, FWIW. I'm guessing there were probably many other related cases around the country also.
The landfill was created in 1982 by the State of North Carolina as a place to dump contaminated soil as result of an illegal PCB dumping incident.
The "illegal PCB dumping incident" refers to dumping of PCB contaminated oil from the Ward Transformer Factory along the sides of highways in several (14) NC counties, back in 1978.
Here in Silicon Valley there's often surprise at my reluctance to eat fruit grown from back yard trees. It's sort of assumed that fruit right off the tree is somehow organic and healthy.
"Have you checked to see if this area is sitting on EPA Superfund designated land, or down stream?" The response is usually a blank look.
So I ask them why is this area called Silicon Valley? Then I ask if they realize how incredibly toxic the solvents used in chip manufacturing are? And then I ask how much 1950s and 60s companies cared about environmental concerns? Most people connect the dots pretty quickly. "Holy shit." Is the usual response.
It really wouldn't surprise me if Fairchild, Intel and the rest just took barrels of used chemicals out back and dumped them into holes in the ground back when.
Google got hit by this a few years ago when they built an office building on top of toxic waste and now have to have 24/7 basement ventilation to make sure workers there don't get sick.
There are whole neighborhoods built on that same polluted land. I'll get my orange from Safeway, thanks.
In the biography of Gordon Moore, he mentioned that when he was inventing Intel's process chemistry they just routinely poured all their solvents down the same drain. The strong acids ate away the concrete (which wasn't noticed until long after), so nearly everything they poured down, went into the ground and hit the water table, then spread out. Moore's excuse was that they didn't really teach chemistry safety when he was in school.
Unpolluted quality soil is a valuable commodity. Anyone growing food in an area with a history of electronics and semiconductor fabrication would be wise to haul in a few truckloads of soil from an organic farmer and grow all their plants in raised beds.
It's possible to build semiconductor devices without polluting the soil and water table, but it means every factory needs to build at least a small chemical waste processing plant onsite, or (better) design new closed-loop manufacturing processes that minimize or eliminate waste.
> Here in Silicon Valley there's often surprise at my reluctance ...
It's definitely not just the Valley. I live in rural western Ohio. It was really eye-opening to see how much contamination there is even here, in a relatively sparsely-populated area. Once I knew the extent my feelings about local real estate changed dramatically. Everybody should research toxic sites in their area.
No doubt the manufacturing center in Dayton, OH, helped drive local contamination. I'm in a suburb 30 miles away in another county, however. We've got fun Superfund sites like the old county incinerator (PCB), two contaminated aquifers (tetrachloroethene and trichloroethylene) under the largest town in the County (from three sources, too!), and lead from a battery "recycler".
I simply can't understand the mentality earlier generations had re: environmental contamination. I hear it in my father (71) re: anthropogenic climate change ("I can't believe the activities of humans could change such a large system...") and I imagine similar sentiments were in the minds of people dumping PCB or lead into the ground. It's chilling to me.
yes, this applies anywhere the land has changed hands. who knows what a farmer or rancher used the land for before they sold it to a housing developer? or did a previous homeowner use pesticides or herbicides that have since been banned?
This is, unfortunately, still ongoing even in Silicon Valley. Apple had a skunkworks office building caught venting their byproducts to atmosphere with completely inadequate filtrating.
I love her sense of humor! One story she tells is about the world’s first computer bug [1], I had never heard it nor the history of the word.
She also mentions they were using computers to enhance satellite photos, it took 3 days to process but they could determine the height of waves in the middle of the pacific and the temperature 20 feet below the surface.
I think that article buries the most interesting part! It's true that "bug" in that sense dates back to the 19th century, but before that, it didn't necessarily mean "insect" - it could mean something like "malevolent spirit", as in Hamlet's "bugs and goblins".
Hopper's involvement is not about being the one to coin the term, but about being the first to find an actual, physical computer bug. It's clear from the story the implication was not that it was the first use of the term as in that case the joke would make no sense.
Just watched this and it was fantastic. The first half is much like public lectures of hers I've watched before, but the second half goes into more depth in a variety of areas that were pretty cutting edge for 1982 like cybersecurity, loose coupling/modularity in software, VLSI/SoC, and programming language standardization.
I loved her few extremely specific references. She mentions the cheapest computer one can buy, the Intel 8021, a chip sold for 13 cents a piece if you buy a hundred. That's a great visualization of how cheap her system of computers can be.
Ok, this got me curious, how much have things changed for low-end embedded microcontrollers?
Some numbers from a few minutes of searching:
- Then: Intel 8021: 1 kB ROM, 64 B RAM, 11MHz, about $.40-.50 in 2024 dollars
- Now: ATtiny25: 1kB ROM, 128 B of RAM, 20 MHz, maybe $.70-$.80 each for a huge order
Not sure if this is the right comparison, and I'm sure there are lots of other differences that the topline numbers don't capture and that I don't know about (e.g, power consumption, instruction set, package size, etc. etc.)
I was disappointed that she didn't really talk about multilevel security, which had solved the computer security problem by the time of this talk. However, her focus on breaking things into individual systems instead of multiprogrammed ones could be seen as an effective approach at the time.
It wasn't until persistent internet connections became the norm, that this would have been shown to be an illusion. An illusion we continue to suffer for to this day.
The proof she presents in Part 2 (t=15:00) on software changes propagating through a system is perhaps the best theoretical justification I have ever seen for Object Oriented design principles and encapsulation:
It's a strong case for loose coupling, but that can be achieved with object oriented programming, functional programming, or any number of other paradigms.
Readit News
> "Now back in the early days of this country, when they moved heavy objects around, they didn't have any Caterpillar tractors, they didn't have any big cranes. They used oxen. And when they got a great big log on the ground, and one ox couldn't budge the darn thing, they did not try to grow a bigger ox. They used two oxen! And I think they're trying to tell us something. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not "get a bigger computer", it's "get another computer". Which of course, is what common sense would have told us to begin with."
Amusingly, in the horse-powered era, once railroads started working, but trucks didn't work yet, there was a "last mile" problem - getting stuff from the railroad station or dock to the final destination. The 19th century solution was to develop a bigger breed of horse - the Shire Horse.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shire_horse
In the Pacific Northwest, US, early loggers would leave the huge ones - to the point where pioneers could complain about a lack of available timber in an old-growth forest.
When the initial University of Washington was built, land-clearing costs were a huge portion of the overall capital spend. The largest trees on the site weren't used for anything productive; rather, they were climbed, chained together, and domino felled at the same time. By attaching the trees together, they only needed to fell one tree which brought the whole mess down into a pile and they burned it.
I think there's a lesson here about choosing which logs you want to move.
Admiral Hopper's lecture wasn't delivered too long after 1976, which saw the release of both the CRAY-1 (single CPU) and the ILLIAC IV (parallel). ILLIAC IV, being more expensive, harder to use, and slower than the CRAY-1, was a promising hint at future possibility, but not particularly successful. Cray's quip on this subject was (paraphrasing) that he'd rather plow a field with one strong ox than $bignum chickens. Admiral Hopper was presumably responding to that.
What they both seem to miss is that the best tool for the job depends on both the job and the available tools. And they both seem to be completely missing that, if you know what you're doing, scale up and scale out are complementary: first you scale up the individual nodes as much as is practical, and then you start to scale out once scale up loses steam.
In your attempt to take down the analogy you just reinforced it. They quickly hit the limits of large oxen and had to scale up far faster than any selective breeding could help.
The exact same thing happened in computing even during the absolute hay day of Moore’s law. Workloads would very quickly hit the ceiling of a single server and the way to unblock yourself was not to wait for next gen chips but to parallelize.
This technique famously remodeled the iconic Tiffany building in NyC. https://www.mgmclaren.com/projects/crane-lift-at-tiffanys/
Though I have to say the part about the cost of not implementing standards, the cost of not doing something, felt scarily relevant right now.
Actually, humans have been doing exactly that through breeding over the millennia. They were just limited in their means.
This analogy has some "you wouldn't download a car!" vibes — sure I would, if it were practical (: And vertical scaling of computers is practical (up to some limits).
That article was re-posted here on HN and elsewhere but didn't seem to get much attention and I feared the worst, since 1-inch magnetic video tape degrades with time. Very frustrating since such vintage VTRs do exist in working order in the hands of museums, video preservationists and collectors. Now six weeks later we get the best possible news! Hopefully, that article and the re-postings helped spread the word and someone in control of access to the tape got connected to someone with the gear.
And what an amazing piece of history to have preserved. I'm only ten minutes into the first tape but she's obviously a treasure - clear thinking, great communication and a sharp wit. Even captured here later in life you can clearly see why she was so successful and highly regarded by her peers (including some the most notable people in early computing history).
>While NSA did not possess the equipment required to access the footage from the media format in which it was preserved, NSA deemed the footage to be of significant public interest and requested assistance from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to retrieve the footage. NARA’s Special Media Department was able to retrieve the footage contained on two 1’ APEX tapes and transferred the footage to NSA to be reviewed for public release.
[0] https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Pre...
"The National Archives and Records Administration has standard procedures and approved vendors for this.[1] One of their approved vendors, Colorlab, has 1" type C equipment. Colorlab is conveniently located just outside the Capitol Beltway, about 20 miles west of NSA HQ at Fort Meade. Colorlab does preservation and conversion work for the Library of Congress, Warner Bros., Universal, NBC, The New York Public Library, Paramount, HBO, etc. NARA has a standard form for government agencies requesting this service.[3] It looks like it's not even charged against the sending agency - Archives picks up the bill."[1]
Maybe somebody got the message.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40957026
The zeitgeist of the time was shifting emphasis onto management (MBA type stuff) but the army had a saying; you can't manage a soldier into war, you lead them.
You manage things, you lead people.
Toxic waste was a highly relevant cultural phenomena at the time. I believe she was referencing the "Valley of the Drums" toxic waste site which was proposed as a superfund site in 12/82. Love Canal made the subject popular 5 years earlier.
For some reason I'm extremely interested in toxic waste. Anyways bit of reference.
Toxic waste is a real life monster that make for the best horror stories. Fictional monsters as in creatures aint got shit on real life willful poisoning of entire communities causing the suffering and deaths of millions. And its all done intentionally because someone wants more money - greed. The real monsters take on a dual form - the head of the beast being the people responsible and the body being the invisible poisons carelessly tossed onto the earth. Makes lovecraft and others look like mickey mouse.
For anyone interested, this is far and away the best book I've read on the subject of toxic waste. It became rare over the past 5 years. Used to be available on Open Library but I think they received a DMCA. Even the NYC public library only has one copy located at the main branch. Library wouldn't let me loan it out.
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Road_to_Love_Canal....
The things that actually happened to real people, the things real people have done... they are just way more incredible and terrible than any one author is capable of dreaming up. The fact that they actually happened also gives them more heft...
The landfill was created in 1982 by the State of North Carolina as a place to dump contaminated soil as result of an illegal PCB dumping incident.
The "illegal PCB dumping incident" refers to dumping of PCB contaminated oil from the Ward Transformer Factory along the sides of highways in several (14) NC counties, back in 1978.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_County_PCB_Landfill
"Have you checked to see if this area is sitting on EPA Superfund designated land, or down stream?" The response is usually a blank look.
So I ask them why is this area called Silicon Valley? Then I ask if they realize how incredibly toxic the solvents used in chip manufacturing are? And then I ask how much 1950s and 60s companies cared about environmental concerns? Most people connect the dots pretty quickly. "Holy shit." Is the usual response.
It really wouldn't surprise me if Fairchild, Intel and the rest just took barrels of used chemicals out back and dumped them into holes in the ground back when.
Google got hit by this a few years ago when they built an office building on top of toxic waste and now have to have 24/7 basement ventilation to make sure workers there don't get sick.
There are whole neighborhoods built on that same polluted land. I'll get my orange from Safeway, thanks.
Some additional reading here: https://semspub.epa.gov/work/09/100018492.pdf
It's possible to build semiconductor devices without polluting the soil and water table, but it means every factory needs to build at least a small chemical waste processing plant onsite, or (better) design new closed-loop manufacturing processes that minimize or eliminate waste.
https://www.sourcengine.com/blog/growing-sustainability-effo...
It's definitely not just the Valley. I live in rural western Ohio. It was really eye-opening to see how much contamination there is even here, in a relatively sparsely-populated area. Once I knew the extent my feelings about local real estate changed dramatically. Everybody should research toxic sites in their area.
No doubt the manufacturing center in Dayton, OH, helped drive local contamination. I'm in a suburb 30 miles away in another county, however. We've got fun Superfund sites like the old county incinerator (PCB), two contaminated aquifers (tetrachloroethene and trichloroethylene) under the largest town in the County (from three sources, too!), and lead from a battery "recycler".
I simply can't understand the mentality earlier generations had re: environmental contamination. I hear it in my father (71) re: anthropogenic climate change ("I can't believe the activities of humans could change such a large system...") and I imagine similar sentiments were in the minds of people dumping PCB or lead into the ground. It's chilling to me.
She also mentions they were using computers to enhance satellite photos, it took 3 days to process but they could determine the height of waves in the middle of the pacific and the temperature 20 feet below the surface.
[1] The Bug in the Computer Bug Story
https://daily.jstor.org/the-bug-in-the-computer-bug-story/
I wrote a little more about this: https://jkaptur.com/bugs/
"I think it's rather nice that the Navy is keeping a few of the early artifacts like the first bug and me and a few other things."
:)
lovely, reminds me of an argentinian tv presenter that we make jokes about regarding her age (97 currently and going strong)
Deleted Comment
She appeared on the David Letterman show a few years later in 1986, https://hackcur.io/grace-hopper-on-letterman/.
Deleted Comment
Some numbers from a few minutes of searching:
- Then: Intel 8021: 1 kB ROM, 64 B RAM, 11MHz, about $.40-.50 in 2024 dollars
- Now: ATtiny25: 1kB ROM, 128 B of RAM, 20 MHz, maybe $.70-$.80 each for a huge order
Not sure if this is the right comparison, and I'm sure there are lots of other differences that the topline numbers don't capture and that I don't know about (e.g, power consumption, instruction set, package size, etc. etc.)
It wasn't until persistent internet connections became the norm, that this would have been shown to be an illusion. An illusion we continue to suffer for to this day.
https://youtu.be/AW7ZHpKuqZg?si=Dzt6JeoX7MDT8D9M&t=899
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40958494
Related:
The NSA Is Defeated by a 1950s Tape Recorder. Can You Help Them? -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40957026 - July 2024 (24 comments)
Admiral Grace Hopper's landmark lecture is found, but the NSA won't release it -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40926428 - July 2024 (9 comments)
> able to retrieve the footage contained on two 1’ APEX tapes
I'm no expert, but I think they meant 1-inch AMPEX tape.
Also, perhaps they should record it in doubly. #ThisIsSpinalTap #Stonehenge #InchsToFeet