（外文电子版资料）Charles Sheffield - Georgia On My Mind.pdf

====================== Georgia On My Mind by Charles Sheffield ====================== Copyright (c)1993 by Charles Sheffield First published in Analog, January 1993 Fictionwise Contemporary Science Fiction Hugo Award Winner; Nebula Award Winner NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the purchaser. If you did not purchase this ebook directly from F then you are in violation of copyright law and are subject to severe fines. Please visit to purchase a legal copy. F offers a reward for information leading to the conviction of copyright violators of Fictionwise ebooks. I first tangled with digital computers late in 1958. That may sound like the dark ages, but we considered ourselves infinitely more advanced than our predecessors of a decade earlier, when programming was done mostly by sticking plugs into plug-boards and a card-sequenced programmable calculator was held to be the height of sophistication. Even so, 1958 was still early enough that the argument between analog and digital computers had not yet been settled, decisively, in favor of the digital. And the first computer that I programmed was, by anyones standards, a brute. It was called DEUCE, which stood for Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine, and it was, reasonably enough to card players, the next thing after the ACE (for Automatic Computing Engine), developed by the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington. Unlike ACE, DEUCE was a commercial machine; and some idea of its possible shortcomings is provided by one of the designers comments about ACE itself: If we had known that it was going to be developed commercially, we would have finished it. DEUCE was big enough to walk inside. The engineers would do that, tapping at suspect vacuum tubes with a screwdriver when the whole beast was proving balky. Which was often. Machine errors were as common a cause of trouble as programming errors; and programming