My wife and I have long vowed not to get a "Personal Computer" for our home, for the same sort of reasons that we do not have a television set -- it would waste too much time, and bore us with the same programs over and over again.
However, as a result of a Logic course which she is taking, my wife has been issued with a real home computer, which, according to the designer, is capable of computing anything that can possibly be computed. Sounds good, eh?
Let me describe this wonderful machine, the envy of Clive Sinclair. It is described as a 'Turing machine' (so that we thought at first that it was a sort of caravan). In fact it consists of a long piece of cardboard marked into one-inch squares, and a set of counters (numbered '1') which can be placed on the squares. In addition, there is a counter which records what 'state' the machine is -- so that if there is a system crash (say, one of us falls asleep in the middle of a computation), the machine can be rebooted with little fuss.
The cycle time of this machine seems to be rather slow: it took 64 instructions and about 15 minutes to verify that doubling 3 (or '111' as computer buffs call it) gives you 6 (or '111111'). However, it is said that it becomes more rapid with experience. Certainly if Mr Turing REALLY used it to crack German codes during the war, he must have been somewhat faster than we are.
Well, in a home where two people each have work to do, it was not long before we discovered time-sharing. All we needed was a much longer piece of cardboard -- so that my wife's Statistical calculations, using SAS, didn't interfere with my attempts to link in NAG and solve an optimization problem.
Our next aim is to link our Home Turing machine into the University mainframe, an IBM 3084: however we are still negotiating with British Telecom to find out how much it would cost for them to lay down a line of approximately 2 miles of cardboard from our house to Cambridge City Centre.
Once that is working, we shall be able to use our Turing machine as an 'intelligent terminal'. I am working on various software for the T.M. (at present I would like to write a version of TeX, draw some Mandelbrot sets, and perhaps design an Adventure game), but progress seems slow at present. Also I am worried about a large cardboard strip which was pushed into our letterbox this morning marked 'Theoretical Chemistry take-over bid' which seems to be trying to milk resources from our micro.
Anyway, I can re-assure you that owning a Home Computer has not changed my life in any way. Although I can now do my tax returns and plan my life using this long strip of cardboard, I shall still need the mainframe for the really difficult calculations!
Jonathan Partington (1987)