August 1995
Beginner
336 pages
6h 4m
English
Still vivid in my mind is the wonder and delight with which I—then 13 years old—read the account of the August 7, 1944, dedication of the Harvard Mark I computer, an electromechanical marvel for which Howard Aiken was the architect and IBM engineers Clair Lake, Benjamin Durfee, and Francis Hamilton were the implementation designers. Equally wonder-provoking was the reading of Vannevar Bush's "That We May Think" paper in the April 1945 Atlantic Monthly, in which he proposed organizing knowledge as a big hypertext web and giving users machines for both following existing trails and blazing new trails of associations.
My passion for computers got another strong boost in 1952, when a summer job ...
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