Comment by jonjacky
3 months ago
Severo Ornstein called his memoir of the 1950s - 1970s Computing in the Middle Ages. Ornstein worked on SAGE, TX-2, LINC, and the Arpanet IMP among other things, before moving on to Xerox PARC.
https://worrydream.com/refs/Ornstein_2002_-_Computing_in_the...
Great read, but he undersells the weight of von Neumann's EDVAC report. If you haven't read that (which I imagine you have), it's crazy how prescient some of the lesser-known ideas are. He seemed to assume that we'd end up with some kind of neural architecture, and it's easy to imagine him being surprised that it took us this long to get serious about the idea.
Apropos of that, I couldn't resist telling Gemini 3 to run with your story prompt from the earlier thread: https://gemini.google.com/share/ac122aba6f7f. Thanks for the inspiration, apologies for following it. :-P
(Also thanks for posting the material you wrote back in the 1980s on the SCP initiative. I had heard of it as an SDI connection or component, but that was all. Reading through it now.)
Thanks! -- Jon