> _Since this talk is being taped, I am forced therefore to remind you that nothing I say represents the plans and policies of the Department of the Navy or the Naval Service at large. Everything I say is purely the opinion of the speaker!_ > > _I'm appalled at you, in a way. You're all "Establishment." And I think I spent 20 years fighting the "Establishment."_ > > _In the early years of programming languages, the most frequent phrase we heard was that the only way to program a computer was in octal. Of course a few years later a few people admitted that maybe you could use assembly language. But the entire establishment was firmly convinced that the only way to write an efficient program was in octal._ > > _They totally forgot what happened to me when I joined Eckert-Mauchly. They were building BINAC, a binary computer. We programmed it in octal. Thinking I was still a mathematician, I taught myself to add, subtract, and multiply, and even divide in octal. I was really good, until the end of the month, and then my check- book didn't balance! (Laughter) It stayed out of balance for three months until I got hold of my brother who's a banker. After several evenings of work he informed me that at intervals I had subtracted in octal. And I faced the major problem of living in two different worlds. That may have been one of the things that sent me to get rid of octal as far as possible._ > > -Grace Hopper, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages (HOPL) conference, June 1978.