On Oxford Street in Cambridge, Mass. lives a sibyl, a priestess of science. Her devotees take their problems to her as devout ancient Greeks took their insolubles to Delphi. She is no mumbling, anonymous priestess, frothing her mouth with riddles. Her name is Bessie*; she is a long, slim, glass-sided machine with 760,000 parts, and the riddles that are put to her and that she unfailingly answers concern such matters as rocket motors, nuclear physics and trigonometric functions. For a computing machine, Bessie is old: she has been steadily at work since 1944. And she is not the brightest of her breed. Compared to her children and grandchildren (one of whom, Harvards Mark III lives on the floor below in Harvards Computation Laboratory),she is dim-witted and slow. But Bessie is a progenetrix, a sort of mechanical Eve. By proving what computing machines could do, she started one of the liveliest developments of modern science. Some scientists think that Bessies descendants will have more effect on Mankind than atomic energy. Modern man has become accustomed to machines with superhuman muscles, but machines with superhuman brains are still a little frightening. The men who design them try to deny that they are creating their own intellectual competitors. -Time Magazine, January 23, 1950
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 22:27:22 +0000
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