On Sun, 15 Jan 2012, John Gilmore wrote: > <begin snippet> > I can't help but wonder what some of the early computing pioneers > would think of this. > </end snippet> > > It is convenient to look at > > John von Neumann, "Lectures on probabilistic logics and the synthesis > of reliable organisms from unreliable components", in Automata > studies, edited by Claude Shannon and John McCarthy, Princeton: > Princeton University Press, 1957. > [...] > > All three of these seminal figures are gone, von Neumann in 1957, > Shannon in 2001, and McCarthy in 2011. All three would have been > unsurprised by this announcement. > > John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
However, I guess they would have been a bit surprised finding that a future superportable machine sporting zetabyte of persistent ram and a miniature cyclotron does not have a compiler on board. Perhaps they would be asking questions, like, "it is so soft and cannot compile, so what you folks use it for, twice a day". Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com ** ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN