When I was a boy my grandfather was slowly dying of mesothelioma. He was the alpha of the troupe and I was his favorite. His passing was surely going to put me in a precarious position. The feds had recruited him during the war to design the insulation system on the new submarine which went on to slaughter the German wolfpack, opening the Atlantic for material shipment in bulk. He supervised production, and was exposed to airborne asbestos for three years. His peers tagged him as the best HVAC designer in Chicago. The feds considered choosing St. Paul, colder in winter, but chose Chicago due to her four-season extremes.
So he went out and bought a printing electro-mechanical calculator, size of a breadbox. He lied to his wife that he needed it for a project. She inquired because it cost $500 bucks. At this point in time dimes, quarters and halves are still made of silver. Half a K was a lotta money back then. "Look in here Donny! See how it works." He always thought it I was going to escape my coming torments, it would be by becoming a computer expert. Being an architect and formerly a designer of mechanical computing hardware, his faith in the utility of the computers to come was absolute.
New technology, if it is any good, supplants the old. When I was born, half the worlds computing took place on the abacus. Seen an abacus lately?
There are a few museums of computing, but I advocate building more and larger ones. The old, physical stuff gave one a notion of what was going on. Staring at an IC chip is, of course, pointless.
Soap bubble computers exist:
People nowadays have way too narrow a conception of computation, IMHO.
When I was a boy my grandfather was slowly dying of mesothelioma. He was the alpha of the troupe and I was his favorite. His passing was surely going to put me in a precarious position. The feds had recruited him during the war to design the insulation system on the new submarine which went on to slaughter the German wolfpack, opening the Atlantic for material shipment in bulk. He supervised production, and was exposed to airborne asbestos for three years. His peers tagged him as the best HVAC designer in Chicago. The feds considered choosing St. Paul, colder in winter, but chose Chicago due to her four-season extremes.
So he went out and bought a printing electro-mechanical calculator, size of a breadbox. He lied to his wife that he needed it for a project. She inquired because it cost $500 bucks. At this point in time dimes, quarters and halves are still made of silver. Half a K was a lotta money back then. "Look in here Donny! See how it works." He always thought it I was going to escape my coming torments, it would be by becoming a computer expert. Being an architect and formerly a designer of mechanical computing hardware, his faith in the utility of the computers to come was absolute.
New technology, if it is any good, supplants the old. When I was born, half the worlds computing took place on the abacus. Seen an abacus lately?
There are a few museums of computing, but I advocate building more and larger ones. The old, physical stuff gave one a notion of what was going on. Staring at an IC chip is, of course, pointless.
Soap bubble computers exist:
People nowadays have way too narrow a conception of computation, IMHO.
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