I knew that Captain Grace Hopper was an early pioneer in computer programming who just so happened to discover and document the first ever computer bug — a literal moth!

But I’d never seen a video of her before.

Yesterday, the NSA declassified a lecture Hopper gave in 1982 at the age of 75.

It’s astonishingly prescient. She likens that moment to the days just after Ford introduced the Model T and changed the face of the country forever:

I can remember when Riverside Drive in New York City, along the Hudson River, was a dirt road. And on Sunday afternoons, as a family, we would go out on the drive and watch all the beautiful horses and carriages go by. In a whole afternoon, there might be one car.

…

Whether you recognize it or not, the Model Ts of the computer industry are here. We’ve been through the preliminaries of the industry. We are now at the beginnings of what will be the largest industry in the United States.

But with the Model T came unintended consequences; Hopper foresaw the same for the computer age:

I’m quite worried about something.

When we built all those roads, and the shopping centers, and all the other things, and provided for automobile transportation… we forgot something. We forgot transportation as a whole. We only looked at the automobile. Because of that, when we need them again, the beds of the railroads are falling apart. […] If we want to move our tanks from the center of the country to the ports to ship them overseas, there are no flat cars left. […] The truth of the matter is, we’ve done a lousy job of managing transportation as a whole.

Now as we come to the world of the microcomputer, I think we’re facing the same possibility. I’m afraid we will continue to buy pieces of hardware and then put programs on them, when what we should be doing is looking at the underlying thing, which is the total flow of information through any organization, activity, or company. We should be looking at the information flow and then selecting the computers to implement that flow.