Wow, I never knew this about this beautiful and smart woman.....👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻

[SeattleVet]

24. Got to meet Grace Hopper twice; she was an amazing speaker and inspiration.

I still have and treasure the 'nanoseconds' she handed out, and also a packet of 'picoseconds' from her stint as a spokesperson for Digital Equipment Corporation after she retired from the Navy at just shy of her 80th birthday (way past normal military retirement age, but she had been recalled to active duty twice, and eventually had her service indefinitely extended by special approval by Congress).

The 'nanoseconds' were a length of wire 30cm (11.8 inches) long - the distance that light travels in a vacuum in that time. She used it as a visual aid when training programmers not to waste nanoseconds of CPU time (when memory and compute time were VERY expensive). She also showed a coil of wire 300 meters (984 feet) long to illustrate a microsecond. The picoseconds? That was a packet of ground black pepper.

"It's almost always easier to get forgiven than to get permission" was one of her mantras. Words to live by!