Word: vacuumers
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Electronic Cobwebs. Laymen are usually baffled When they first look at the machines. Except for Bessie, who has thousands of moving parts that spin and clack entertainingly, they are mostly electronic, and look like the insides of big, enormously complicated radio sets. Among their thousands of vacuum tubes runs a tangled web of fine, insulated wire. On their panels lights flash mysteriously: red lights and white lights dancing like motes in the sunlight as the numbers flow. Harvard's newest machine, Mark III, is probably the handsomest. It was built for the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance...
...Language. The machines prefer such numbers because their essential parts (electrical relays or vacuum tubes acting like swift relays) obey only two commands: yes or no-i.e., an electrical signal or no signal. So all information fed into the machines has to be predigested into yes-or-no binary arithmetic. Any number, however large, can be expressed in this form. So can elaborate equations like those from the fission problem done for Princeton by the I.B.M. machine. Even languages can be translated in binary numbers. (One way: making different numbers stand for each character, syllable or word.) Any sort...
...brain's essential parts, says McCulloch, are "neurons" (nerve cells). There are about 10 billion of them, and they are living electrical relays, comparable to the relays and vacuum tubes in the machines. The neurons are intricately connected by fine, often branching fibers, so the whole brain is a lacelike network of relays and conductors...
...Hour. Practical computermen, some of whom deplore McCulloch's analogies, agree with him on one point: that the machines need better memories. The machines are already quicker than the brain: their vacuum tubes act 1 ,000 times faster than neurons. But their poor memories (rudimentary compared to the brain's) limit their thinking abilities. The punched tapes and cards that some of them spew out are not real internal memories, since they cannot be consulted quickly. They are more like reference libraries...
...Neither Langmuir nor G.E. could get a patent on the high-vacuum tube; it was considered only one contribution to the development of high-power tubes...