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Grace Murray Hopper
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“[Her analogy on systems clustering:] When a farmer needs more ox power to plow his field, he doesn't get a bigger ox, he gets another one. Then he puts the oxen in parallel.”
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“Developing a compiler was a logical move; but in matters like this, you don't run against logic — you run against people who can't change their minds.”
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“If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you've just proven a natural law!”
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“[On first use in 1945 of the term "bugs":] From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.”
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“If it's a good idea ... go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than to get permission.”
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“The most damning phrase in the language is 'We've always done it this way.'”
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“You don't manage people; you manage things. You lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington.”
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“We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.”
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“I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... They carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.”
Grace Murray Hopper, U.S. mathematician, rear admiral, computer pioneer
(1906 - 1991)
Full name: Grace Brewster Murray Hopper.