This is a fantastic insight that I am including in my "Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curate in November 2021"
Grace Hopper, US Navy Rear Admiral, Computing Pioneer, and (for a brief period) Digital Employee is famous for saying: “It is easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”
I have found this to be at least partly true. I think the modified, very software-developer-centric version of this for me became: “Don’t ask permission to write the code, ask permission to check it in.” My version skips the forgiveness part, because although there are indeed times when you should “just do it” and possibly upset people in the process, it’s not really a collaborative or reliable long-term strategy. You still need eventual buy-in with my modified version of avoiding asking permission. But it does allow for taking the initiative to do something nobody asked you to do, which is really a killer skill if you can master it.
Ned Utzig in Two Things I Learned When I Crash Landed at a Startup
Ah, Data General! Their NOVA line was my first minicomputer experience. The best description of that computer I've seen was that it was the best PDP-8 ever made. With 4 16-bit accumulators and a whopping 32k bytes of unsegmented memory addressing capability, it was a lot nicer to program than the PDP-8 must have been.
BTW, a couple of years ago I sold the reference manual I still retained from the mid 70's. Apparently there are still NOVA fans out there somewhere...
Ah, Data General! Their NOVA line was my first minicomputer experience. The best description of that computer I've seen was that it was the best PDP-8 ever made. With 4 16-bit accumulators and a whopping 32k bytes of unsegmented memory addressing capability, it was a lot nicer to program than the PDP-8 must have been.
BTW, a couple of years ago I sold the reference manual I still retained from the mid 70's. Apparently there are still NOVA fans out there somewhere...
This is a fantastic insight that I am including in my "Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curate in November 2021"
Grace Hopper, US Navy Rear Admiral, Computing Pioneer, and (for a brief period) Digital Employee is famous for saying: “It is easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”
I have found this to be at least partly true. I think the modified, very software-developer-centric version of this for me became: “Don’t ask permission to write the code, ask permission to check it in.” My version skips the forgiveness part, because although there are indeed times when you should “just do it” and possibly upset people in the process, it’s not really a collaborative or reliable long-term strategy. You still need eventual buy-in with my modified version of avoiding asking permission. But it does allow for taking the initiative to do something nobody asked you to do, which is really a killer skill if you can master it.
Ned Utzig in Two Things I Learned When I Crash Landed at a Startup
Ah, Data General! Their NOVA line was my first minicomputer experience. The best description of that computer I've seen was that it was the best PDP-8 ever made. With 4 16-bit accumulators and a whopping 32k bytes of unsegmented memory addressing capability, it was a lot nicer to program than the PDP-8 must have been.
BTW, a couple of years ago I sold the reference manual I still retained from the mid 70's. Apparently there are still NOVA fans out there somewhere...
Ah, Data General! Their NOVA line was my first minicomputer experience. The best description of that computer I've seen was that it was the best PDP-8 ever made. With 4 16-bit accumulators and a whopping 32k bytes of unsegmented memory addressing capability, it was a lot nicer to program than the PDP-8 must have been.
BTW, a couple of years ago I sold the reference manual I still retained from the mid 70's. Apparently there are still NOVA fans out there somewhere...