Don’t forget Grace Hopper (1906 – 1992), American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. > Hopper became known for her nanosec

Don’t forget Grace Hopper (1906 – 1992), American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. > Hopper became known for her nanoseconds visual aid. People (such as generals and admirals) used to ask her why satellite communication took so long. She started handing out pieces of wire that were just under one foot long—11.8 inches (30 cm)—the distance that light travels in one nanosecond. She gave these pieces of wire the metonym "nanoseconds." She was careful to tell her audience that the length of her nanoseconds was actually the maximum distance the signals would travel in a vacuum, and that signals would travel more slowly through the actual wires that were her teaching aids. Later she used the same pieces of wire to illustrate why computers had to be small to be fast. At many of her talks and visits, she handed out "nanoseconds" to everyone in the audience, contrasting them with a coil of wire 984 feet (300 meters) long, representing a microsecond. Later, while giving these lectures while working for DEC, she passed out packets of pepper, calling the individual grains of ground pepper picoseconds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper