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But I never liked doing school math, or math calculations in general. Things got a bit better when I started to use a slide rule, and then in 1972 a calculator-of which I was a very early adopter. Now you might remember from my age-7 school report that I didn’t do very well in math. OK, so by the time I was 16 I had published some physics papers and was starting to be known in physics circles-and I left school, and went to work at a British government lab called the Rutherford Lab that did particle physics research. Well, for my loader, I came up with what I later found out were error-correcting codes-and I set it up so that if the checks failed, the tape would stop in the reader, and you could pull it back a couple of feet, and then re-read it, after shaking out the confetti. You see, the big problem with the Mylar tape that one used for serious programs is that it would get statically electrically charged and pick up little confetti holes, so the bits would be read wrong. And in the end my biggest achievement with the Elliott 903 was writing a punched tape loader for it. But back then I was unlucky with my cellular automaton rule, and I ended up not discovering anything with it. Well, a decade after that, I made some big discoveries about cellular automata.
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And to make this fit on the Elliott 903 I ended up simplifying a lot-to what was actually a 2D cellular automaton. The molecule positions were supposed to be real numbers one had to have an algorithm for collisions and so on. But back when I was 12, I really wanted to reproduce it-with the computer. As it happens, years later I discovered this picture was actually kind of a fake. What’s on the cover is supposed to be a simulation of gas molecules showing increasing randomness and entropy.
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It often seemed like one of the most important skills was rewinding the tape as quickly as possible after it got dumped in a bin after going through the optical reader.Īnyway, I wanted to use the computer to do physics. It’s sort of funny how these things work out. You know, I remember when I was maybe 5 or 6 being bored at some party with a bunch of adults, and somehow ending up talking at great length to some probably very distinguished Oxford philosopher-who I heard say at the end, “One day that child will be a philosopher-but it may take a while.” Well, they were right. I actually happened to notice her textbook on philosophical logic in the Stanford bookstore last time I was there. My mother was a philosophy professor at Oxford. My father ran a small company-doing international trading of textiles-for nearly 60 years, and also wrote a few “serious fiction” novels. I was born in London, England, in 1959-so, yes, I’m outrageously old, at least by my current standards. And some I didn’t see coming.īut let me begin at the beginning. When I look back, some of what’s happened seems sort of inevitable and inexorable. Inevitably a lot of what I’m going to talk about is really my story: basically the story of how I’ve spent most of my life so far building a big stack of technology and science. And in which the language automates as much as possible so one can go as directly as possible from computational thinking to actual implementation.Īnd what I want to do here is to talk about how all this came to be, and how things like Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha emerged along the way. The focus is the Wolfram Language, which is really a new kind of language-a knowledge-based language-in which as much knowledge as possible about computation and about the world is built in. And mostly that’s what I’ve been out in the Bay Area this week talking about. This happens to be a really exciting time for me-because a bunch of things that I’ve been working on for more than 30 years are finally coming to fruition. But the Computer History Museum asked me to talk today about my own history, and the history of technology I’ve built. But I find history really interesting and informative, and I study it quite a lot. I normally spend my time trying to build the future.