Dalí's soft watches, slipping through your CPU

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Christmas Eve



Software is instructions for computers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_(disambiguation) tells us sagely so that we can safely rip up that dictionary thing


There would never have been computer hardware without software, but it's nice to imagine that there was a time when the machinery was jokingly first called 'hard', as if straight from the toolshop, and someone parried by calling the programs that were being run 'soft'.

I like to think that that is what happened, but I know that finding out The Truth, at this remove, is impossible anyway, so who are you to doubt me on the basis of some Internet version of it ? (Unless Richard P. Feynman, or Enrico Fermi, wrote about it in his diary.)

And where those famous watches came into it, I do not know, although one can more easily track when they first made an appearance, slung over a branch...


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