Grace Hopper — "The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose …"
The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Grace Hopper
"I will not take what you need to give me. I will take what you want to give me."
"No computer is ever going to ask a new, reasonable question. It takes trained people to do that."
"If one ox could not do the job they did not try to grow a bigger ox, but used two oxen. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not to get a bigger computer, but... to build systems of comp…"
"I always say the Mark I was the most fun."
"You don't teach people how to be curious. You give them the tools through which they can express their curiosity."
Details
A witty remark highlighting the paradox and challenges of standardization in technology.
Date: Unknown
GeneralVerification
Confirmed
Found in 2 providers: gemini,grok
2 sources checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
A dry, ironic jab at the dysfunction of competing standards. True standardization means universal agreement on one approach — but when dozens of bodies each publish their own 'standard,' the word loses all meaning. The humor lands because it exposes a real absurdity: organizations, committees, and vendors produce competing specifications, leaving engineers free to pick whichever suits them, which is the precise opposite of what a standard is supposed to achieve.
Relevance to Grace Hopper
Hopper spent decades championing COBOL — the first standardized business programming language — through committees like CODASYL and ANSI. She navigated institutional turf wars where every stakeholder wanted their own specification. Her entire career was built on pushing machine-independent code precisely because proprietary fragmentation paralyzed the industry. This quip distills her lived frustration: she believed in genuine standardization but watched committees multiply 'official' standards until the concept became self-defeating.
The era
From the 1950s through the 1980s, computing fractured across incompatible hardware platforms — IBM, UNIVAC, DEC, Honeywell — each with proprietary languages and data formats. Character encoding alone had scores of competing schemes before ASCII. ANSI, ISO, and IEEE simultaneously published overlapping standards. Programmers could not move code between machines without full rewrites. Standardization committees became battlegrounds for institutional control, often producing multiple 'official' standards that deepened fragmentation rather than resolving it.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].