Still vivid in my mind is the wonder and delight with which I—then 13 years old—read the account of the August 7, 1944, dedication of the Harvard Mark I computer, an electromechanical marvel for which Howard Aiken was the architect and IBM engineers Clair Lake, Benjamin Durfee, and Francis Hamilton were the implementation designers. Equally wonder-provoking was the reading of Vannevar Bush's "That We May Think" paper in the April 1945 Atlantic Monthly, in which he proposed organizing knowledge as a big hypertext web and giving users machines for both following existing trails and blazing new trails of associations.
My passion for computers got another strong boost in 1952, when a summer job at IBM in Endicott, New York, gave me hands-on experience in programming the IBM 604 and formal instruction in programming IBM's 701, its first stored-program machine. Graduate school under Aiken and Iverson at Harvard made my career dream a reality, and I was hooked for life. To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one's bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion. I am very thankful.
It is hard to imagine a more exciting time to have lived as a computer devotee. From mechanisms to vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits, the technology has exploded. The first computer on which I worked, fresh out of Harvard, was the IBM 7030 Stretch supercomputer. Stretch reigned as the world's fastest computer from 1961 to 1964; nine copies were delivered. My Macintosh Powerbook is today not only faster, with a larger memory and bigger disk, it is a thousand times cheaper. (Five thousand times cheaper in constant dollars.) We have seen in turn the computer revolution, the electronic computer revolution, the minicomputer revolution, and the microcomputer revolution, each bringing orders-of-magnitude more computers.
The computer-related intellectual discipline has exploded as has the technology. When I was a graduate student in the mid-1950s, I could read all the journals and conference proceedings; I could stay current in all the discipline. Today my intellectual life has seen me regretfully kissing subdiscipline interests good-bye one by one, as my portfolio has continuously overflowed beyond mastery. Too many interests, too many exciting opportunities for learning, research, and thought. What a marvelous predicament! Not only is the end not in sight, the pace is not slackening. We have many future joys.