Showing posts with label Richard P. Feynman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard P. Feynman. Show all posts

Monday 24 December 2012

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...