What’s in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.The GIF is now 30 years old, but it already feels immortal - possibly because it’s already outlasted the internet’s most turbulent periods of evolution. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What you know about computing other people will learn. Above all I hope we don’t become missionaries. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.
I think we’re responsible for stretching them setting them off in new directions and keeping fun in the house. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful error-free perfect use of these machines. Of course the paying customers got shafted every now and then and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. When it started out it was an awful lot of fun. “I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”
But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.Ībsolutely useless. Frankel wasn't paying any attention he wasn't supervising anybody. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.Īfter a while the whole system broke down.
The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about.
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