The principal aim is to develop and investigate experimentally
a new way in which computer can aid more effectively people
in their creative work in their thinking in any field,
from research to engineering design, management, education,
and support.
The fact of the matter is that the situation with respect
to computers today is somewhat similar as the situation
with respect to power, electrical power
or mechanical power, immediately following
the invention of the steam engine.
The steam engine made it possible for people
to build locomotives, big machines that could do work
that no individual, or group of individual,
or group of animals, for that, could possibly do.
In the same sense, computers today
can perform calculations and logical operation
that it would take years and years for any reasonable group
of people to do by hand.
The big difference, particularly to our society,
came when power could be distributed
through the electrical system and was brought into the home,
into the offices of people wherever people worked.
That made it possible for the development
of use of power tools, sewing machine, vacuum cleaners.
In a general sense, power put new powerful physical tools
in the hands of people.
Now, what we would like to do is do the same thing
for what we might call logical power
and bring the ability of computers
to perform logical operation computations
at the service of the individual in whatever he may be doing.
In essence, what we want is to make
computers accessible to people, and access really
has two aspects--
a physical aspect, namely you want
to be able to operate a computer from, let's say, near my desk.
The second is the intellectual aspect.
That is person would like to be able to instruct the computer
to do what he wants directly and conveniently, that is using
terminology and a language that is convenient to the individual
and not necessarily convenient to the computer.
Now, what has been stopping the use
of the computer on the part of many people
until now is just this barrier of instructing the computer.
And what many scientists, for instance, have been doing--
using specialists called programmers
to instruct the computer to solve,
let's say, the problem that the scientist may want.
But this places a real barrier between the scientist
and the computer.
What we would like is to make it possible,
for instance, for the scientist to instruct directly
the computer and how to do what the scientist wants.
Now, there is another point that I
want to bring up, namely that the computer system that we are
aiming and we are developing contains
a great many programs already developed which are
at the disposal of the user.
And in other words, the user doesn't
have to instruct the computer on how to do everything
that he wants to get done but only the parts that
are very special and very new to the problem with which he's
concerned at that time.
Many facilities are already available
and stored within the system, so that in a sense
each individual has available literally at his fingertips
the work of many people that have preceded it.
In a very real sense, the computer system
that we are just barely beginning to develop
will contain what amounts to a library, a library that
is available to every user of the system.
Now, I think that this is a extremely important point
because this is what permits the facilities of the whole system
in helping individual to build up automatically
almost through this system being used by many people.
That is the work of each individual
can remain within the system and become
available to other people.
I can make this point clear by showing how the system operates
at this stage and demonstrate the use of a program
that they developed just a few days ago.
First thing I'm going to do is to have the system print
out the program that I wrote a few days ago.
For that purpose, I simply type in.
[TYPEWRITER RATTLING]
Now the computer has just typed out the program
that I wrote a few days ago exactly as I wrote it by typing
at this teletypewriter.
The next step is to translate this program
into the detailed machine language
that the computer understands.
I will do this by just writing the name of the language, which
happens to be MAD, followed by the name of the program,
which I chose to be my own name, Fano.
At this point, the computer is translating my program.
The program has already been translated,
and the computer is typing back some data about the program
itself as it ended up to be.
Now I can start running this program
and compute prime numbers.
All I have to do is type in--
[TYPEWRITER RATTLING]
--the word "logo", and the program will start operating.
The computer is asking me what range of prime numbers I want.
I'm going to say the range from 1 to 100.
[TYPEWRITER RATTLING]
Well, here they come.
1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53,
59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, and that's the end.
[TYPEWRITER RATTLING]
Now, this was a simple program that I wrote a few days ago.
It could have been a long program written
by me or by somebody else.
In fact, I got a whole library available to me
literally at my fingertips.
Now, there are two more important
points that I want to make.
One is that while I was working here,
there were many other people working simultaneously
with the computer.
At the present, the maximum number
of people that can work simultaneously
through a terminal like this one is 24,
but this number will increase with time
as we learn more and more how to develop this particular mode
of operation.
I expect that within a couple of years
there will be hundreds of people capable of working
simultaneously at their own terminals
with the same computer.
Now, of course we are just beginning in this.
It is a long road to develop a system which
is practical for everybody to use,
and there are many problems that were involved as the same thing
as after Bell invented the telephone.
It took a work of great many people for many years
before we got to the present state in which you or I can
dial long distance all over the place.
The same thing as after the invention
of electric generators.
It took many years before electricity was available
in the average home and in every office and factory.