Thanks for the name. I couldn't recall it if my life depended on it. Time to visit google and see if I can find if that wire was just under or over a foot. Like I said, it's one of those useless little factoids that sticks with you for some unknown reason.
+T
<edit a quick search didn't verify the length of the wire but it did yield a date of the 60 Minutes broadcast - March 1983, though I seem to recall seeing it as a kid, not at the age of thirty; strange how the mind stores memories>
<edit2 further searching yielded: "Grace Murray Hopper was a great thinker. One anecdote says that she had a clock in her office that ran counterclockwise; this reminded her that there was always more than one solution to a problem. As a teacher, Hopper often used a physical demonstration to lecture future computer scientists about not wasting time. Pulling out a piece of foot-long wire, Hopper explained the wire represented a nanosecond, which was "the maximum distance electricity could travel in wire in one billionth of a second" . Then she would display a coil of wire about one thousand feet long and explain that it represented a microsecond -- certainly something no programmer would want to waste."
as well as this little gem: "After the war, Hopper continued at Harvard as faculty in the Computation Laboratory. She worked on the Mark II and III, and it was during her work there that "She traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug" /edit>