This Rochester Review letters page cheered us both considerably tonight. Mike Armstrong, brilliant computer guru at the University of Rochester Computing Center in our day, confesses to being overwhelmed by today's computing power. His letter ("Something Doesn't Compute" in about the middle of the page) is worth reading as a peek into the field's ancient history; we joined the game in the days of the IBM 360/65. But it was to the final paragraph that we could relate best:
But those were, to me, the good old days of wooden computers and iron programmers. When I left the Computing Center in 1980, I felt I knew the room-sized computer systems thoroughly, from the hardware to the operating systems and most of the application programs. Now I carry a small computer in my pocket that has more memory and more computing power than all of NASA’s computers when they put Neal [sic] Armstrong on the moon, and I have no idea how it works. And it also makes phone calls.
Note that the other person to comment on the same photo connects our two schools: Roger Ehrich has ended up at Virginia Tech.
