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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