They were totally alone in holding fast to the audacious notion that com-puters should serve up answers as quickly as possible, like instantly in real time. No one but no one in the 1950s expected a computer to respond for up to thirty minutes or more.
They also believed that a computer needed a monitor to see information, a keyboard with which to input data and a light gun (think, mouse) to interact with the computer’s memory. So they invented them. Everyone else was quite content interacting with a computer using only IBM punch cards.
They were ridiculed for believing in a 16-digit word length for their machine; way too short was the argument against them (IBM’s personal computer, decades later in 1981, would also have a 16-digit word length).
They also resolved that digital data should not reside only in a single computer, but rather it should be sent over telephone lines to other machines. Technically impossible, scoffed AT&T, who at the time controlled all telephone service in the US. They showed AT&T how to do it.
They ruffled establishment feathers, especially in math departments, by teaching the then-heretical subject of binary arithmetic to anyone within earshot.
Quite magnanimously, in an age when there were only a dozen other electronic digital computers, all of which were fiercely private machines,
they freely offered the use of their computer to anyone who needed it…and even instructed people on how to properly operate the machine.
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