At 2:44 PM 4/5/5, Jed Rothwell wrote: >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed > >Horace Heffner wrote: > >>Also interesting. Before posting I checked the electronic version of the >>American Heritage Dictionary, copyright 1992, for "innumerate" and it did >>not have it. > >I have heard the term all my life, because my mother was a statistician.
Strange, it is not in the 1971 version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). >That is also why I spent hours immersed in actuarial tables, population >distribution maps, and back issues of the Journal of the American >Statistical Association when I was eight years old. I also got to go see >the computers at the Census Bureau back when computers were computers, by >golly, and the CPU alone took up the whole room. Yep, by golly. For a few years in the 70's I travelled cost to cost installing systems software in big computer systems. Some systems consumed more than the area of a football field in raised floor. In those olden days I recall having to work out the total system power and air conditioning Btu requirements before ordering any device, including a disk controller, which was a device about twice the size of a refrigerator. Now disk controllers are a mere chip. Some day disk drives will go the way of punched cards. Regards, Horace Heffner
