(In reference to the engineers sharing space in the Institute for Advanced 
Studies building in Princeton, NJ with the academics in the fall of 1946 as one 
of the first stored program computers was being created.)
"As they moved up from the boiler room to the first basement directly below the 
ground floor of Fuld Hall there were vocal protests on all fronts. To the 
Humanists the computer people where mathematitions and to the mathematitions 
they where engineers. 'Even the curiosity so natural to all scientific people 
was overruled by the passionate distance toward anything that might conceivably 
deviate from from pure and theoretical thinking', Claire von Neumann [wife of 
John von Neumann] explained. Bigelow [one of the EEs] describes the situation 
as one of 'People who have to think of what they were trying to do objecting to 
people who seem to know what they were trying to do'.'"
For the sake of the second inner quote that a few of you may appreciate I  
transcribed this from the audio version of  Dyson's book Turing's Cathedral.
Pete

_______________________________________________
Triangle, NC Embedded Computing mailing list

To post message: [email protected]
List info: http://mail.triembed.org/mailman/listinfo/triembed_triembed.org
TriEmbed web site: http://TriEmbed.org
To unsubscribe, click link and send a blank message: 
mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe

Reply via email to