Word: performance
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hoare sent out an appeal for more mercenaries, and by last week he had recruited and trained 270 new whites from South Africa, Rhodesia and Britain, who got six weeks of drill at the Congo's Kamina airbase, then moved north with Hoare to perform their first big mission-isolation of the rebels from their sanctuaries in Sudan and Uganda...
...world by letting a space traveler take a "stroll" outside his orbiting capsule only a few days before (TIME cover, March 26), have yet to claim that their cosmonauts have varied the earth-girdling curve of a spacecraft in flight.* But before men can make a lunar excursion or perform other active missions outside the earth's atmosphere, they must learn to make those orbit alterations with exquisite precision. Spaceships must be maneuvered so surely that they can meet and mate aloft; their pilots must act as accurate and reliable links in the chain of information and command that...
Formidable Adulthood. The whole science of cybernetics is now entering a new stage. In it, steadily more complex and powerful computers will be called upon to perform infinitely more varied and more difficult tasks. Boeing announced plans two weeks ago to outfit jetliners with computer-run systems that will land a plane in almost any weather without human help. A new "talking computer" at the New York Stock Exchange recently began providing instant stock quotations over a special telephone. In Chicago a drive-in computer center now processes information for customers while they wait, much as in a Laundromat...
...perform their increasing tasks, computers are developing into formidable adulthood. Computermen claim that their machines are now entering a "third generation" in which the new science of microcircuitry and other advances in technology will enable them to reduce the bulkiness of computers, pack more ability into their frames and make them even more reliable and economical. Computers are now being banded together into "families"-compatible groups of machines, ranging from small to large, that are able to solve problems and perform functions from beginning to end by using a single language and program. To broaden the uses of computers...
These men, ranging from the systems engineers at the top down to the machine operators, have made a pampered and all but adored child of the computer. Not content with having it perform wondrous feats in space and on earth, they are constantly trying to extend its capabilities. In the experimental milieu they have created, they have taught computers to play ticktacktoe, blackjack, checkers and a passable game of chess, instructed it to compose avant-garde music (the Illiac Suite at the University of Illinois), write simple TV westerns and whodunits, and even try its hand at beatnik poetry. Example...