50. On Computers

What is new about the computer? You walk into a room and you see familiar machines: a typewriter, a tape recorder, a television, a telephone, audio speakers, of course a calculator --but none of these are new.

Unseen, however, beneath the floors and behind the walls, are cables connecting all these machines to work together as one. There is digital technology that allows them to all speak the same language -thereby transforming them from many ordinary machines into a single powerful computer.

Now, let’s take your own life. You do business, you study, you eat, you talk --each activity seemingly irrelevant to the next. A mess of fragments.

And such, too, is the native psyche of the human being: We have minds that understand one way, hearts that feels another --and what we do has often nothing to do with either of those.

Take the technology of the computer and apply it in terms of your everyday life: Find a common meaning at which all these fragments converge, and thereby unleash their power.

(Told in the days of the Big Computer to my father-in-law, Avraham Polichenco, professor of computer science)