When I was in sixth grade (in a Catholic mission school in east India around 1986), an older student who had just failed his high school exam for maybe the fifth time and also broken up with his maybe seventh girlfriend told a group of credulous sixth graders a fantastic story about the computer.
Interestingly, this “true story” was as much about love as about the computer, maybe more! He said that a year or two ago, a hundred or so scientists of the world had gathered in New Delhi to learn more about the universe, the organisms, the society, and so on—from the computer! None of us had actually seen or knew much about the computer till that time, except for the one chapter at the end of our math book that described how the computer uses some common mathematical logic in the form of computing loops. Continue reading
