Grace Hopper

“I've received many honors and I'm grateful for them; but I've already received the highest award I'll ever receive, and that has been the privilege and honor of serving very proudly in the United States Navy. As appeared in the October 1986 issue of Chips , a Department of the Navy information technology magazine”

“I've always been more interested in the future than in the past . As quoted in The Reader's Digest (October 1994), p. 185”

“I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs. As quoted in Grace Hopper : Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer (1989) by Charlene W. Billings, p. 74 ISBN 089490194X”

“There's something you learn in your first boot”

“I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?”

“Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me.”

“I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?" On being the oldest active”

“At present , we're putting on paper a lot of stuff that never needed to be on paper. We do need to keep the records. But there isn't any reason for printing them. The next generation growing up with the computers will change that. As quoted in the U.S. Navy's Chips Ahoy magazine”

“From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer , we said it had bugs in it. On the removal of a 2”

“We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex data”