This is

as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

. Here I write about many things. In the past I wrote about other things but the past is past. I write code for people to play with, I write about my life on Twitter, and I write here.

On I wrote Early patent death, on the subject of Musings.

Christie’s are holding an auction of The Origins of Cyberspace. This contains much, much cool stuff. Turing’s On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots , the play that invented the word “robot“. And the document that began the information revolution, Eckert and Mauchly’s Outline of plans for development of electronic computers.

And what do we see from Christie’s own description of that seminal document ?

Five weeks after the unveiling of the ENIAC on February 14, 1946, Eckert and Mauchly resigned from the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School over a disagreement about patent rights.

Bloody patent people nearly strangled the digital revolution before it had even begun! What does this tell you?

I have tried to convince work that we should devote some of the IT budget to buying cool documents from this auction and displaying them, rather than the not-very-good art we currently have on the walls, but they are having none of it. Bah.

dusoft

They are selling what? English translation of R.U.R.? WTF?

I have the original here, no that old, but still the book in its original language.

dusoft

OK, sorry, my mistake. They are selling Czech original. I guess it wouldn’t be that difficult to find R.U.R. from twenties/thirties here in the library.

This website belongs to Stuart Langridge. Contact details are available. Don't eat yellow snow. Valid HTML5, at least in theory, except for the bits that aren't because I'm that futuristic that I'm ahead of the spec, oh yes. HTML5 help from Bruce Lawson, among others. Fonts from the superb FontSquirrel. End.