The current (6 June 2012) issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly includes, as promised, a brief report on Eric Schmidt’s remarks at the Turing centennial events at Princeton last month.  Perhaps of greater interest were letters from a number of students who had been involved in various ways with the MANIAC computer in the 1950’s.  Typical of the remarks is the following: ‘We were not welcome at the Institute.  The scientists’ concept of appropriate use of the computer was to read in a small amount of data, computer for a long time to produce an important result, and output a small amount of data.  Since our project involved a great deal of input and output, they accused us of using their computer as a punch-press!’  (Letter from Bill Clarkson, Class of 1958)

                                                                                           Thomas Drucker

                                                                                           University of Wisconsin—Whitewater

druckert@uww.edu