Grace Hopper’s Nanosecond: The Physical Lesson We Forgot
She handed out wire segments to teach latency. Today’s engineers think the cloud is magic. Physics hasn’t changed.
The Short Version
I toggled my first program into an Altair via front-panel switches in the late 1970s, entering machine code by hand, one bit at a time. In the 1980s, I ran BBSs when "online" meant dialing in at 300 baud. In the 1990s, I had two full T1 lines running into my house (3 Mbps total, when most people were on dial-up) because I was running servers before "the cloud" existed.
I have never stopped working below the software line. I write firmware, I design and prototype circuits, and I have taken boards from schematic through fabrication into products that shipped. I don’t have an EE degree. I learned it the way I learned everything else on this page, which is by building the thing and finding out where it fails. There is a bench in Las Vegas where I can prototype most any circuit I need.
I spent the 2000s surviving the crash. I spent the 2010s fixing the messes left by "move fast and break things."
I served aboard the USS Missouri during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The Navy taught me that systems don’t care about your feelings. If you ignore physics, ships sink. If you ignore economics, startups die.
I have two heroes. The first is David Ahl, who wrote the BASIC games books that got me started programming at about seven years old. He ran education products at DEC and then founded Creative Computing magazine. I finally wrote to thank him, in 2022 and again in January 2025, and I was glad to find him still around. The second time he answered the next day. He was pleased the books had been useful, and said he had always meant the games as a way to teach programming first and to entertain second.
The other is Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. When officers asked why satellite links were slow, she handed them a piece of wire 11.8 inches long, the distance light travels in a nanosecond. Physics does not negotiate. She served in the Navy until she was 79. I wrote about her at the Field Manual, and I wish I had understood that wire decades earlier.
Both made a hard thing easy to see, which may be why I keep building things that explain themselves.
I don’t sell “digital transformation.” I sell reality checks.
