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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC)

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To: Len Roselli who wrote (71016)	1/12/1999 2:39:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) of 186894

Need for computers The Russians brilliant advances in physics and numerical computation without computers must stand as one of the greatest human mental achievements in history. It is also a shameful example of how brilliant men and women allowed themselves to be exploited for an evil regime -- largely by threats and coercion. Zel'dovich, Landau and the guys did wonders, but they should have died first. American achievements were just as wonderful, but were aided by the development of digital computers, especially by von Neumann and IBM. During the war, von Neumann and Harold Hotelling were considered national computing resources. They were amazing ready reckoners, and were flown from place to place to solve computations that were set up for them in advance. I imagine there were others, but those guys could do detailed integrations in their heads. I don't believe computers as such played a significant role until after the war. The ballistic tables ('44) were quite important, but probably the most important computational aids were the tables of the binomial theorem prepared by unemployed mathematicians during the depression as part of WPA grant to the National Bureau of Standards. My mentor was Daniel Slotnick, the father of Illiac IV and an early patent holder on parallel processing. As irony, his named was misspelled on the patent application. He was a "celestial mechanic" and pretended to be on call to fix break-downs in the mechanisms of the heavens. He also had the filthiest mouth of any human being since Ezekiel -- forwhich he deserves to be remembered and revered ("The Man Who Shocked Berkeley!"). He was von Neumann's assistant on computer development at Princeton IAS and told me some of these tales. A great man and a good friend. I revere his memory. I once took this man (he was my boss and predecessor, Director of the Center for Advanced Computation at U of Illinois)into his own laboratory and tempted him into a computer craps game I had written which had an (near) invisible booby trap. He prided himself as a gambler. I beat him for hours. He would not quit. My proudest intellectual achievement. This produced Nihil's Law : Never shoot craps with the programmer of the game.

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