A Shortcut Through Time The Path to the Quantum Computer (Paperback (Trade Paper)) Product Description
A Shortcut Through Time The Path to the Quantum Computer Chapter 1 Simple Electric Brain Machines and How to Make Them I dont know where I first saw the advertisement for the Geniac Electric Brain construction kit, but I knew I had to have one for Christmas. It was the early 1960s, and like a lot of science-crazed kids I was obsessed with the wonderfully outrageous idea of thinking machines. I devoured the picture stories in Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post about the electronic behemoths manufactured by companies like International Business Machines, Univac, and Remington Rand. The spinning tape drives and banks of blinking lights were as exciting to me as the idea of space travel. Two of my favorite books were Tom Swift and His Giant Robot and Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine-testaments to the eerie fantasy of automating human thought. One day, flipping through one of my favorite magazines-probably Boys Life or Popular Science-I stumbled upon an unbelievably tantalizing ad. Can you think faster than this Machine Below the provocative headline was a picture of the Geniac with its sloping panel bedecked with six large dials and a row of ten bulbs. Who knew what kind of mysterious circuitry was hidden inside GENIAC, the first electrical brain construction kit, is equipped to play tic-tac-toe, cipher and decipher codes, convert from binary to decimal, reason in syllogisms, as well as add, subtract, multiply and divide. . . . You create from over 400 specially designed and manufactured components a machine that solves problems faster than you can express them. Such was the promise of the Oliver Garfield Co., 126 Lexington Avenue, New York 16, N.Y. (This was before zip codes replaced the old numbered postal zones.) To a boy growing up in Albuquerque, the location of this modern Frankenstein laboratory seemed promisingly exotic and far away. Send for your GENIAC kit now. Only 19.95. . . . We guarantee that if you do not want to keep GENIAC after two weeks you can return it for full refund plus shipping costs. There was nothing to lose. I began my lobbying effort, making it clear to my parents that receiving a Geniac was all that mattered to me. Then I waited, my brain charged with the kind of high-voltage anticipation that can only accumulate in someone still in the first decade of life. Christmas morning I sat on the floor anxiously opening presents, keeping my eye out for one large enough to hold the pieces of an electronic computer. Finally a likely box emerged from behind the tree. I tore off the wrapping. Decades later I still remember the disappointment I felt as I explored the contents of the cardboard package. The title of the instruction manual was intriguing enough Simple Electric Brain Machines and How to Make Them. But how was anyone to carry out such an ambitious project with the meager, humdrum parts that had been supplied Digging through the pile, I was crestfallen to find that the bulk of the kit consisted of
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A Shortcut Through Time The Path to the Quantum Computer (Paperback (Trade Paper))
