[extropy-chat] man man

[Anders Sandberg]

My computing teacher in highschool had once been a Ph.D. in the team that
built the first Swedish computer. The memory was Williams-Kilburn type
cathode ray memories in big racks. My teacher is probably the only person
in the world who has managed to have his foot crushed by a byte when he
accidentally pulled out one too far.

I still remember an exam he gave where we had to write small assembly code
programs for the machine. At the start the programs invariably consisted
of a series of "read the next word from punched tape"-instructions: each
instruction was only half a word long, so it could read the next two. That
way you only had to flip the switches to make the first read instruction
to start your program.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University