Capt. Grace Hopper in 1982 noting the tendency to focus on hardware and software when we should be focusing on data quality. Highly relevant in a time of LLMs.
One of the things that bothers me is that we’ve talked about data processing for 30 years we spend all our time talking about hardware and software. We paid no attention to the data. And yet the data is our raw material. Our output is information - our product. And we should be concentrating on the data and the information. The hardware and software are, after all, only the tools which we do the processing, and should not occupy the primary position in our thinking. It’s high time that we began to turn our attention to the data and the information that we’re putting out.
Hopper, Grace. (1982, August 19). Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part 1) (NSA.Hopper.TVC930A) [Video recording]. Computer and Information Sciences Institute. National Security Agency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9iqF5uTFk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9iqF5uTFk)
