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. The computer had a clear
notion of correct and incorrect, true and false. Were my ideas correct? The
machine could tell me. This was very seductive.
I was lucky enough to get a job programming early supercomputers and
discovered the amazing power of large machines to numerically simulate advanced
designs. When I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley in the mid-1970s, I
started staying up late, often all night, inventing new worlds inside the machines.
Solving problems. Writing the code that argued so strongly to be written.
InThe Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone's biographical novel of Michelangelo,
Stone described vividly how Michelangelo released the statues from the stone,
"breaking the marble spell," carving from the images in his mind.4 In my most
ecstatic moments, the software in the computer emerged in the same way. Once I
had imagined it in my mind I felt that it was already there in the machine, waiting
to be released. Staying up all night seemed a small price to pay to free it - to
give the ideas concrete form.
After a few years at Berkeley I started to send out some of the software I had
written - an instructional Pascal system, Unix utilities, and a text editor called vi
(which is still, to my surprise, widely used more than 20 years later) - to others
who had similar small PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers. These adventures in
software eventually turned into the Berkeley version of the Unix operating
system, which became a personal "success disaster" - so many people wanted it
that I never finished my PhD
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