comparison in our final chapter. Software is written in a language that can be understood by the computer. The ever-changing landscape in the computer world is the attempt to construct languages that bridge the gap between the sensori-motor environments of the computer with the sensor-motor environments addressed by the programmers that create the software. A good programmer can think like a computer; a good computer language sounds like a person talking to another person. Software expresses the computer, and as such, is the mechanism that translates the concepts of this book into practice.

At the high-level at which we’re looking at computers, we need to add the concept of an application framework. Such a framework specifies how the software needed for a particular task is installed in the memory of the computer. In a very large sense, this is how computers acquire new skills, or, actually lose them if the application is removed. Applications are programmed to build on the innate capabilities of the computer to introduce new processing of input and output information. Here we are using the word programmed in exactly the same way that we referred to the establishment of acceptable stimulus-action responses within the human brain. We view the programming or training as coming from an external source and, through some type of positive action, imprinted upon the controlling, cognitive elements within the computer.

We noted in the second chapter that the early decades of computer development and deployment saw reciprocal effects in the size and number of computers. Early computers were big, bulky and relatively few in number. Over time, the computers became smaller and subsequently much greater in number. The connection between the two effects illustrates the variability of the ecosystems in which computers operate. With larger systems, their sources of food, that is the energy to run them, and the amount of it needed, formed a distinct limitation on where such machines could be located. They required considerable logistical support for their operation as well; air conditioning systems to keep the systems from melting themselves and, perhaps more important, from cooking the people required to operate them and to keep them in a proper state of repair.

A rather typical computer circa 1965 would require a room of a few hundred or a few thousand square feet in area and a staff of perhaps ten to twenty people to keep it running around the clock. Such machines were expensive to own and to operate. The net result of this large, logistical infrastructure certainly limited the mobility of the computer (once they were put in place, one simply did not move them without exceptional cause) and consequently limited the types of problems to which they could be applied. With the advent of the transistor and subsequently the invention of the integrated circuit, the size of computers began to decrease and with each diminution came a new realm of use for the machines.

The evolutionary process of natural selection applied itself quite well to the emerging, smaller computer systems. Each design iteration provided systems that could be housed in more varied locations, required fewer and less specialized operators and were subsequently applicable to a much broader range of problems. The noises of the dinosaurs as they became extinct were noteworthy in their lack of comprehension; “Why would anyone want a computer in their home?” Ken Olsen, founder and chairman of Digital Equipment Corporation, reportedly questioned before his company folded with the advent of the very personal computer he decried.

In 1959, future Nobel laureate Richard Feynman made a classic presentation entitled There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom in which he suggested the possibilities inherent in making all of our machines smaller. In contemplating the usefulness of miniaturized computers, he noted a lack of understanding of how to accomplish the miniaturization in a cost effective manner at that time, but

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