Made In America - Bill Bryson [223]
One of the first popular investigations into computers appeared in March 1961 when Life magazine ran an article, ‘The Machines Are Taking Over’, about the new phenomenon. In a tone of chirpy awe, the author noted how a room-sized ‘robot’ (a word he used throughout the story) had transformed the efficiency of the Braun Brothers sausage factory in Troy, Ohio. When fed a stack of punch cards telling it what cuts of meat were available, this device ‘hummed softly, its lights flickered, and it riffled the deck of cards over and over again’. After just thirty-six minutes of technological pondering, it spewed out the optimum recipe for making bologna: ‘24 pounds of cow meat, 24 of beef, 103 of beef cheeks, 150 of beef plate, 30 of neck bone meat, 24 of picnics, 65 of neck trimmings, 10 of trim conversion, 20 of rework from previous batches’. That was all it did. It couldn’t handle accounts or billing, or monitor the company’s heating and electricity. Thirty-six minutes of intense thinking about beef cheek and neck trimmings, and it retired exhausted till the next day.
It doesn’t seem a terribly impressive performance now, but just five years earlier, Braun Brothers would have needed several million dollars and a separate building to house the computer power necessary to calculate the best use of beef plate, trim conversion and the other delectable constituents of a well-made bologna. At just $50,000, the Braun Brothers computer was a snip.
The same article went on to note how a computer in Glendale, California, was programmed with the 500 words most frequently used by Beatnik poets and told to create its own poems. Typical of the genre was ‘Auto-Beatnik Poem No.41: Insects’, which included these lines:
All children are small and crusty
And all pale, blind, humble waters are cleaning,
A insect, dumb and torrid, comes of the daddyo
How is a insect into this fur?
The reporter noted that when several of these poems were read to an unsuspecting audience at a Los Angeles coffeehouse, many listeners ‘became quite stirred up with admiration’.26
Though the computer is a comparatively recent entrant into daily life, some of the terminology associated with it goes back half a century or so. Computer bugs dates from the 1940s. There is, it appears, a literal explanation behind the term. In 1945 a huge US Navy computer broke down. Its operators searched in mystification for a cause until they found a moth crushed between the contact points of an electrical relay switch. After that whenever a computer was down, it was said to need debugging.27 Bit (a contraction of binary digit) was coined at about the same time, though its offspring, byte (eight bits for the technically unaware), dates only from 1964, and was apparently chosen arbitrarily.28 Equally arbitrary is the Winchester disk drive (first recorded in print in 1973). It doesn’t commemorate any person or place, but was simply the code-name under which IBM developed the technology.
Computers have spawned many technical languages – Assembler, Pascal, C, C++, OLE, Lisp, Ada, Fortran, Cobol, Algol, Oberon, and others almost without number – and these in turn have generated a huge vocabulary. But for the lay-person searching for linguistic excitement the computer world is pretty much a dead planet. Though computer terminology runs to many thousands of words, the great bulk coined in the past twenty years, probably more than half are merely elaborations on already existing words (port, format, file, copy, array), and those that are original to the field are almost always dully and self-evidently descriptive of their function (microprocessor, random access memory, disk driver, database). A slight exception is the operating system known