“After a few months she turned to her brother in frustration and he found the problem: every now and then she had used octal when figuring her balance. Hopper realized that she could not work in octal all day and then live in a normal decimal world the rest of the time. Her answer was not that she should learn octal better, but that the computer should learn decimal. At this point the germ of an idea came to her to let the machine do the dirty work; she would instruct it in her own language.”
