Without a good feel for a billion, or a billionth, it's hard to get a feel for a nanosecond.
Visualization for a nanosecond: a piece of wire 11.8 inches long, which is the maximum distance light/electricity can travel in 1 ns. A microsecond is a coil of wire 984 feet long. So if you're trying to understand why it takes so dang long to send a message via satellite or whatever, just understand that there's a whole bunch of nano/micro/milli-seconds between here and there. This also explains why computers must be small to be fast.
(Background: Rear Admiral Grace Hopper started programming on the Harvard Mark I in 1944, and wrote the first ever compiler in 1952 on the UNIVAC I. She earned the nickname "Grandma Cobol". Info via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper , which also summarizes this video in the "anecdotes" section.)
It's not quite clear what the first ever compiler was, since "compiler" is kind of a fuzzy category, but Rear Admiral Hopper might have given that credit to Betty Holberton.
>> in 1997, she received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award from the IEE Computer Society for developing the sort-merge generator which, according to IEEE, "inspired the first ideas about compilation."
Whereas Hopper coined the term "compiler" and wrote the first one that's recognized as such:
Indeed. But A-0 isn't what we'd call a "compiler" today. It was a gradual evolution from Holberton's work (1948? 1949?) through A-0 in 1952, up to, say, 1957, when the first optimizing FORTRAN compiler was shipped, which is definitely what we would call a compiler today.
