Today, an analogy game. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
I've often said that we and
our machines mirror one another. Yet, it is a
strange mirror. What do we really see when we look
at a machine? We don't see ourselves at first
because of a time lag in the reflection. What
happened when you first looked at a computer? You
felt neither need nor empathy for it. We can't need
what we've never experienced! Yet that first
glimpse began a long process.
You have friends who still jitter about this new
medium -- wondering whether to accept the change
it'll bring into their lives -- or keep dodging it.
The need for transformation lies at our biological
core. But we fear change, nonetheless.
The first computers I ever used filled rooms. We
had to speak to them with punched cards. The
simplest conversation stretched into weeks. We'd
submit 3-inch decks of cards, wait 24 hours, and be
handed a 500 page sheaf of nonsense output --
because a do-loop went mad when we misplaced a
period.
Even as we computed things that'd been quite beyond
us a few years before, we became desperately
frustrated in the '60s. All we talked about was
increasing the speed of calculation, but what we
really needed was a more accurate mirror of our
human nature.
During the 1970s we finally began speaking to
computers directly with keyboards. Then we realized
we could compose text and print it out. Of course
the computer took no responsibility for organizing
the text. So we began demanding that word
processing logic be built into the computer. The
early 1980s brought in the invention of software --
canned sets of commands we could call up from the
keyboard. Software now processed our words and it
laid out spreadsheets. New programming languages
removed the burden of speaking in the language of
the machine. It became more fluent in human
tongues.
If the computer has become more human, we've been
adapting to the computer at the same time. We've
changed our work habits and our prose. We've
changed what we expect of human communication. The
computer has swallowed up our old algorithms of
multiplication and long division. Meanwhile, like
another human being, the computer does more and
more of its work behind our back.
So images flow back and forth in the mirror of our
machines. How much thought did we give to the first
IBM computers, isolated in clean-rooms with their
big tape drives? When my father saw his first
automobile chuffing by an Illinois cornfield, he
had no idea he would see cities completely reshaped
by that primitive device. Nor did he have any idea
how cars would shape themselves to human bodies and
human responses.
He had no more idea in 1900 than I did in 1959 when
a student in my research group told me he was using
a computer to do one of our calculations. If he'd
told me he was changing human history, I would've
laughed at him. But he was. For he had begun the
very mirroring process -- that shapes the human
species.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
