Microsoft Word Hopper Grace oral history. 1980. 102702026. final doc

 

 

CHM Ref: 

X5142.2009

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Pantages:  

When I came in it was like, 16, 32, 64K memory. And I kept saying look how 

much they did on those systems. You were conceiving of the original systems as effectively 

minis.  

Hopper:  

Just translated it. That 16-bit chip I’ve got is awful close – the new 68000 

Motorola is very close to being as powerful as UNIVAC I. So all right, I can have a system of 

them. On the other hand, I think marketing, and the other people in design, are scared to try 

and…I think there’s a tendency to sell a guy one box, so they are trying to put them all inside 

the box.  I was going to let them be standalone.  

When you look at the UNIVAC 80 and you open the door, there’s an awful lot of computers 

inside there.  Interpreting instructions and layers and all sorts of things. And by now on every 

disk and everything, you do have a computer in it. But they aren’t telling people that yet. They 

think it’ll scare them. 

Pantages:  

Do you remember the original proposal Univac made to United, the one that 

failed? It was trying to do all things on one machine more or less. They had a half dozen of them 

or something. That and the Burroughs and TWA effort.  

Hopper:  

That’s right.  

The thing that’s going to get us into that future is not theory. It’s not 

going to have exponents and subscripts and high mathematical theory. It’s going to be common 

sense. And that’s awful hard to sell to people. It doesn’t look pretty. When you write it out, it’s 

just some words. No exponents. No subscripts. It doesn’t impress everybody. So you’ve got a 

job there.  

Pantages:  

It’s tougher to service because you have to go so many places, rather than one.  

Hopper:   

No, now that each company has all the pieces you don’t run into that. Besides 

which the micros don’t go down. Reliability is fantastic. That darn little Motorola of mine didn’t go 

down six years. The only things that go down now are things that are electromechanical.  You 

still have problems with disks, burners, but not with the computer anymore. Besides which the 

price of the chips is coming down so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see at least one company 

sell you a database management system and you buy the software and they throw the 

hardware in with it.  

Pantages:  

It looks like Cullinane is doing that. 

Hopper:  

That’s it exactly. And Cincom too, probably. So we’re going to turn around in the 

other direction again. The one thing that bothers me, for instance, here you’ve got calculators. 

You can have a programmable calculator with built-in routines for the sine, cosine, tangent and 

all those things. Why hasn’t anyone put all those things into the big computers?  

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CHM Ref: 

X5142.2009

                    © 1980 Computer History Museum                           Page 

43

 of 54

 

 

 

 

Pantages:  

They haven’t?  

Hopper:  

No, only Hewlett-Packard is thinking of it. 

Pantages:  

I guess there’s something wrong in my background. They haven’t always had 

that there? 

Hopper:  

No. You wrote the program for them. You have a calculator that has chips that 

have those things that have been worked out now for about five years. They are known to be 

correct. Why not put those chips into a big machine? You wouldn’t need them in a data 

processing machine, but if you are selling a machine to engineers and scientists, it would be 

one board and it would have all those routines in there. And you’d be doing the processing in 

ROM instead of RAM – which goes twice as fast. I think you can buy a board; I’ve seen an ad in 

one of those magazines where a board has a microcomputer on it and then has all those 

routines on it, and the micro makes it possible to connect it to most anything. But still, as far as I 

know, Hewlett-Packard is the only one of the big manufacturers contemplating building those 

into a computer.  

So I’ve been yelling about that for about a year now. If I can have them in my programmable 

calculus, then I can have them in my computer. Sure it takes more memory. If they decide to do 

it, there would be an extra charge on your hardware and you would have an extra board in your 

computer. I think that Hewlett-Packard is the one outfit that is doing it.  And of course they do 

that small stuff; a lot of it does go to engineers. 

Pantages:  

Which is the genesis, which is why I assumed it was that way. 

Hopper:  

No, they’re in the programmable calculator, not on the computer, which is silly. It 

is silly.  

Pantages:  

It’s another one of those things, like structured programming, that are supposedly 

a new technique. 

Hopper:  

If they’d leave the top-down off and call it modular, I’d be perfectly happy. 

Because there are some programs you do not want to write top-down structures because all you 

do is generate a horrible amount of unnecessary code. And there are many cases where you 

should use a go-to instead of a perform. That is the trouble when you try to generalize anything. 

There are always specific cases in which you don’t want the general case. And there are still 

uses for RPG. 

What we tended to do in the programming area is when we got rid of the vacuum tube 

computers, we threw overboard everything we knew about programming and started all over 

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