On Computing

On Computing

Dedicated to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing. The efforts of these individuals have allowed the human brain to reinvent itself so many ways, so many years later. They gave us a physical place to think comparatively and grow as a species. Their intention was never to replace the human brain, but to remove the load-bearing weight of thinking about things that don't necessarily matter.

I

Do you remember the first computer you actually brought into your home?

What do you think about that first one, compared to the one in your hand today?

The very first computer my family ever brought home was a Hewlett-Packard desktop with Windows 3.1. This operating system was quickly replaced by Windows 95 roughly a year later.

I was maybe my son's age, maybe a little older. The computer came with a free copy of Encarta. For a child mind like mine, who had spent hours poring over copies of Encyclopedia Britannica at my grandparents' house, a digital copy of the same information organized by search keys I could type in was purely magical.

I became stuck on one particular entry in the digital encyclopedia.

The moon landing.

I was stuck here for two reasons, one of which being, the computer I was using to learn about the moon landing in 1994 was significantly more powerful than the computers that humans used to land on the moon.[1]

I was using a Windows 3.1 personal computer, with a 28.8k dial-up modem to access the newish internet. AOL dominated the '90s, by the way. I feel like they were handing out free CDs in everything from cereal boxes to dish soap.

The computer I used had an Intel processor, 4 MB of RAM, and a 200 MB hard drive. It probably cost my parents close to a thousand dollars to bring into our home.

Compared to what we used to land on the moon, this was a steal.

But compare those statistics to the device you're reading this on, and none of it makes sense. Twenty-five years stood between the moon landing and that desktop. More than thirty stand between that desktop and now, and the second gap did far more to the machine than the first one did.

The exponential growth of computer technology shows a pattern consistent to human discovery.

What does that mean?

That means, as we learned more about how computers worked, we allowed them to be the load-bearing machines of thought. With the addition of the internet and social media, we allowed them to be the load-bearing machines of emotion, and that's where we went wrong. But that's another story for another day.

The point I'm trying to make is, the human brain is what made the equations that landed us on the moon, not the computer. The computer helped shape the reality we reached for as humans.

As we reached for more knowledge, the foundational discoveries of computing allowed us to reach farther, and faster.

How did we do it?

II

We built the machine out of an idea about the brain.

That is not a figure of speech, and it is not quite a compliment either. When John von Neumann set down the architecture nearly every computer since has been built on, he described its parts in the language of neurons, borrowing the model McCulloch and Pitts had published two years before — a nerve cell as a thing that sums what arrives and decides whether to fire.[2] The blueprint says so in the architect's own hand. The machine on your desk descends from a drawing that called its own components neurons.

So the resemblance is real, and it is documented, and it goes only so far. What we actually built was a room with the filing cabinet on one wall and the desk on the other, and a clerk walking between them. That walk is the whole design. It is also the one thing a brain never does — there is no wall in a head, no cabinet, no clerk. But we will get to that. For now it is enough to say that the borrowing was genuine and the copy was not exact, and that everything interesting sits in the gap between those two facts.

Fast forward to 2026, and we're using AI and quantum technology to literally multiply the edges of human understanding in computing technology.

Zoom in. Or, let's rein it in, is more accurate here.

Of course, as I've hinted at in my other pieces, it's important for the artist to hold the brush in a way that distinguishes a difference between the mind and the paint.

Make sense?

III

So how did these innovators build a human mind from things we found on earth? The origins of the processor can be dated back to a room full of gears in Babbage's imagination[3] — but the line you and I are actually standing on starts in 1947, in a hallway at Bell Labs, with a little sandwich of germanium that came to be called the transistor. A switch with no moving parts.

Two men, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, had found a way to make a rock decide between yes and no.[4] Their boss, William Shockley, worked out the better version the following year and did not get one built until 1951; the three of them shared a Nobel in 1956, which is why the story usually arrives with all three names attached to a room only two of them were standing in.[5]

A decade later, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, working separately, learned to print those decisions side by side onto a single wafer and called it the integrated circuit.[6] The first ones held a handful of components. The thousands came later, and then the millions, and nobody stopped to mark the moment the counting became pointless.

And in 1971, Intel folded an entire calculating machine onto one chip the size of a fingernail and called it the 4004.[7] The first microprocessor. The first time the whole act of thinking-in-numbers had a single, holdable home.

IV

But if you'll notice, as human discovery began to collapse on the possibility of electronic calculation, we expanded the environment for it to think.

Think here about how a computer is built. Hard drive for storing information, RAM for remembering things on the hard drive, and the processor being the third between the two. Turning internal stimuli into external registry through things like a sound or video card.

So picture the machine again, and then picture the head it was modeled on. What follows is a metaphor being run at full extension, and I will tell you where it snaps.

The hard drive is long-term memory. Everything you've kept — your mother's voice, the smell of your grandparents' house, the fact that Encarta had an article on the moon — lives spread across the cortex, with a small structure called the hippocampus working as the librarian, deciding what gets filed and where.[8] Power the machine down, and the drive keeps what's on it. That's the cortex. That's the part of you that survives sleep.

RAM is what you're holding right now. The prefrontal cortex keeps a handful of things lit up at once — this sentence, the thought behind it, the cup of coffee cooling at your elbow.[9] It's fast, it's small, and it's volatile. Stop paying attention and it's gone, the way RAM forgets the instant the power blinks. You don't store your life in RAM. You think in it.

And the processor — the third one, the one standing between the store and the working bench — is the part I had to sit with the longest.

My first instinct was the thalamus. Almost every signal your senses gather passes through it on the way up to the cortex; it is, almost literally, the third thing standing between the world and your memory of it, routing everything inward.[10] If you want the part that simply behaves like a CPU — taking it all in, deciding where it goes — it's the thalamus.

But I keep landing somewhere older, and I think you'll understand why. Descartes pointed at the pineal gland and called it the seat of the soul — the one place, he thought, where the mind reached down and touched the meat.[11] He was wrong about the anatomy and right about the ache. Because that's the question this whole piece is circling: where does the thinking become the thing? Where does the artist's hand stop and the paint begin? The processor is the place where information stops being stored and starts being done — and if I had to put a finger on the spot in the head where the math becomes a moonshot, I'd put it where Descartes put his, knowing full well I was pointing at a metaphor and not a map.

V

Here is where it snaps.

Everything I just walked you through depends on the parts being separate. The drive over here, the working bench over there, the third thing carrying between them. That separation is the design. It has a name — engineers call the traffic jam it produces the von Neumann bottleneck, the delay you pay every time the clerk has to make the walk.[12]

A brain does not have one. There is no bottleneck in a head, because there is no walk. The place a memory is stored and the place it is worked on are the same place, and the working is what the storing is made of. Nothing is fetched. Nothing waits its turn. The cabinet and the desk are the same piece of furniture, and it thinks by being rearranged.

So the map I drew you is a real map of a real machine, and the head it was drawn from does not have the roads on it.

I don't think that ruins anything. I think it is the most interesting sentence in this essay. We built a machine from a guess about neurons, inherited a division of labor the brain never had, and then spent eighty years getting so good at the guess that the guess became the standard by which we describe the original.

When you say your memory is stored, you are speaking machine. The word arrived from the thing we built.

What is left, when the resemblance is set down, is a smaller claim that holds better. The computer has become load-bearing for human thought — not a copy of the thinking, but a genuine part of it. Andy Clark and David Chalmers made this argument three decades ago and gave it a name: when a tool is reliably available, automatically trusted, and easily reached, it stops being something you consult and becomes part of the system doing the thinking.[13] Their example was a notebook. They were early.

That is the claim I would defend. Not that we made a brain. That we made something the brain now thinks with, and cannot easily think without, and did it so completely that most of us have stopped noticing where one ends.

Where that leaves the rest of it — whether a thing we think with can eventually think, whether the gap is a difference in kind or only in wiring — I am not going to settle here, and I am not sure the question is shaped in a way that admits settling. I only wanted to be honest about which half of the sentence I could hold up.

VI

But the "things," the data passed between the electrical components, are just information. Digital information, but information downloaded into its framework by the humans who invented it.

For a while, that's all it was. In the nineties the computer was an island. You fed it a disc, it handed you back exactly what was on the disc — Encarta, a spreadsheet, a game — and when you wanted something it didn't have, you dialed out over the phone line and waited, listening to that handshake scream, for a single page to assemble itself one row of pixels at a time.

Then the islands found each other. The line got fatter, the wait got shorter, and the web stopped being a thing you visited and became a place you lived. Somebody built an index for it, and suddenly the whole library answered to a search box — the same magic Encarta had worked on me as a kid, scaled up until it swallowed every encyclopedia ever printed. The thousand-dollar tower on the desk shrank into the slab in your pocket, and the load-bearing machine of thought went everywhere you did.

Somewhere in there we handed it more than thought. We gave it our friendships, our grief, our attention — we made it load-bearing for feeling, too, and I already told you that's where we stumbled. Set that down for now.

Because the newest turn is the one we're standing in. The library got so large that no human could walk it anymore, so we taught a machine to read the whole thing and walk it for us.

With the invention of AI, even that information comes to us from sources faster than our own external processors can manage. The use of "bots" has essentially made them the envoy between the grand library of human knowledge and the user.

This is an ideology that is repeated in many modern-day perspectives of the use of AI and computers, not just mine.

VII

Let's zoom back in one last time before I close this piece.

I didn't cover the second reason I got stuck on Encarta reading about the moon landing in 1994.

Once the data about the moon landing was collected into its digital source, it was relayed to me through the use of a 1 MB graphics card that sacrificed color for pixel size. Let me put that into scope. In 1994, on a card like that, you picked your poison: 640×480 in high color, sixty-five thousand shades of it — or you climbed to 1024×768 and dropped back to 256.

The conversation that stems from here turns into the sales pitch I proposed to my parents about the necessities of the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics card that hit the market in 1996.[14] I proposed it was essential to my education. It was. But it served a dual purpose. 1 MB of graphics didn't support the game I was trying to play.

Half-Life.

Don't get me started on Half-Life, that's a whole exploration of perception and duality all over again. But I'll be the first to tell you, that game was groundbreaking and timeless in its own right. Built on a heavily modified Quake engine, it became the ground floor for Counter-Strike, which started life as a mod somebody made in their spare time and outlived nearly everything it was built on.[15]

I digress.

The little bit of audio visual data relating to the moon landing that my computer could spit out for me besides "words" was a video clip with the audio attached, very short. Armstrong landing on the moon, and saying the thing that resonated for all of time afterward.

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

I always thought he meant the same thing twice. I never truly understood.

What I didn't know then is that he meant to say a man. One small step for a man — one single person — against one giant leap for mankind.

The letter that would have split them clean, that little "a," never made it into the recording. Armstrong said he intended it, and thought he had said it, and admitted at a thirtieth-anniversary gathering that he could not hear it either when he listened back. He asked, in the end, only that people print it in parentheses.[16]

I find that more moving than certainty would have been. A man says the sentence of his life, gets home, listens to the tape, cannot find the word he meant, and asks for a bracket instead of an argument.

And maybe it doesn't matter that it went missing, because the missing word is exactly what kept me circling the two of them for the better part of thirty years: man and mankind, fused into a single sound, daring me to find the seam.

Later in life, I used this quote as a foundational understanding to find the variance in Biblical scripture that separated "man" from "mankind" even though they were also essentially the same word.

Today, I realize that all he was saying was here he is.

Taking a small step for him, the man.

But taking a giant leap, for all of mankind.

His actions on that day were the product of human thought.

In his mind, he made two great achievements at the same time.

And whatever anyone decides to believe about that day afterward, the deciding is a separate act from the doing. He stepped. The stepping is what the sentence is about. Anything said about it since is a claim made in a different room, answerable to evidence, and it does not reach backward to touch the man on the ladder.

VIII

And maybe that's the cleanest way to say it, in the language we taught the machines to think in.

Every program ever written runs on a few small words. IF something is true. AND another thing is true. OR, failing that, some other thing. THEN — do this.

That's not just how a computer decides. It's how Armstrong decided. IF the math holds, AND the engines fire, AND a man is willing, THEN the species takes a step it can't take back. It's how the moon landing resolved into something real and stayed there: enough true things lined up at once, and the world returned a one instead of a zero.

The machine only ever runs the logic. It was a human mind that decided which things were worth the word IF.

When ideas combine, discoveries are made, achievements are had. Creation within the framework is a product of the human mind. But the question of who — or what — designed the framework still stands unanswered.

But I would be amiss not to mention the importance here of keeping our creations under control.

Onward to the future.

But for now, I need sleep.

My computer is tired, and my brain is getting hot.

Notes

1. The Apollo Guidance Computer carried roughly 36,864 words of read-only rope memory and 2,048 words of erasable memory, running at about 2 MHz. See Eldon C. Hall, Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer (Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1996).

2. John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (Philadelphia: Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 1945), which describes the machine's elements as "neurons" and cites Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115–133.

3. Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, designed from 1837 onward and never completed in his lifetime. Ada Lovelace's Note G to her translation of Menabrea's account of the engine sets out a method for computing Bernoulli numbers and is generally described as the first published algorithm written for a machine.

4. John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain, "The Transistor, a Semi-Conductor Triode," Physical Review 74, no. 2 (1948): 230–231. The point-contact device was demonstrated at Bell Telephone Laboratories on 16 December 1947.

5. William Shockley conceived the junction transistor in 1948; a working device followed in 1951. The 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics was shared by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.

6. Jack S. Kilby demonstrated a working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in September 1958; Robert Noyce arrived independently at the planar silicon version at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959. See Kilby, "Invention of the Integrated Circuit," IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices ED-23, no. 7 (1976): 648–654.

7. The Intel 4004, released in November 1971, is standardly described as the first commercially available single-chip microprocessor.

8. The account of the hippocampus as consolidating and routing declarative memory to distributed cortical storage is standard; see Larry R. Squire and Pablo Alvarez, "Retrograde Amnesia and Memory Consolidation: A Neurobiological Perspective," Current Opinion in Neurobiology 5, no. 2 (1995): 169–177. The word "librarian" is the author's, not the literature's.

9. On the prefrontal cortex and the maintenance of a small number of items in working memory, see Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic, "Cellular Basis of Working Memory," Neuron 14, no. 3 (1995): 477–485.

10. On the thalamus as the principal relay of sensory information to the cortex, see S. Murray Sherman and R. W. Guillery, Exploring the Thalamus and Its Role in Cortical Function, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

11. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul (1649), arts. 31–32.

12. The term is John Backus's, from "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs," Communications of the ACM 21, no. 8 (1978): 613–641.

13. Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers, "The Extended Mind," Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19. Their conditions are that the resource be reliably available, readily accessible, and automatically endorsed when retrieved.

14. The 3dfx Voodoo Graphics accelerator reached the consumer market in late 1996.

15. Half-Life (Valve, 1998) was built on a substantially rewritten Quake engine, later called GoldSrc. Counter-Strike began in 1999 as a Half-Life modification by Minh Le and Jess Cliffe. Team Fortress, sometimes grouped with these, in fact predates Half-Life as a 1996 Quake modification.

16. At a thirtieth-anniversary gathering in 1999 Armstrong said that the "a" was intended and that he thought he had said it, but that he could not hear it in the transmission, adding that he would be happy if it were printed in parentheses. Later acoustic analyses have been offered on both sides and the matter remains unsettled.

References

Backus, J. (1978). Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style? A functional style and its algebra of programs. Communications of the ACM, 21(8), 613–641.

Bardeen, J., & Brattain, W. H. (1948). The transistor, a semi-conductor triode. Physical Review, 74(2), 230–231.

Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. J. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.

Descartes, R. (1649). The passions of the soul.

Goldman-Rakic, P. S. (1995). Cellular basis of working memory. Neuron, 14(3), 477–485.

Hall, E. C. (1996). Journey to the moon: The history of the Apollo guidance computer. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Kilby, J. S. (1976). Invention of the integrated circuit. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, ED-23(7), 648–654.

Lovelace, A. (1843). Notes by the translator. Appended to L. F. Menabrea, Sketch of the analytical engine invented by Charles Babbage. Scientific Memoirs, 3, 666–731.

McCulloch, W. S., & Pitts, W. (1943). A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5, 115–133.

Sherman, S. M., & Guillery, R. W. (2006). Exploring the thalamus and its role in cortical function (2nd ed.). MIT Press.

Squire, L. R., & Alvarez, P. (1995). Retrograde amnesia and memory consolidation: A neurobiological perspective. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 5(2), 169–177.

von Neumann, J. (1945). First draft of a report on the EDVAC. Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania.

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