🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <28...@scorn.sco.COM> ev...@sco.COM (Evan A.C. Hunt) writes:

	   You program it [MINIAC] by speaking English into
   a microphone, by the way, but for some reason the
   Professor's astounding acheivments in natural language
   processing go completely unmentioned.  Aside from that
   little glitch, however, the book fairly realistic

As far as I can recall, (limited both by the sands of time
and by the vagueness of the original description) the MINIAC
(?) could do no computation at all; it was just an oversized
file cabinet.  Joe, Danny, and Irene had to solve every
algebra probelm in their text by hand, then store each
answer into memory, and remember the byte address of the
place they put that particular answer.

Whether they kept a big index on paper was not mentioned.
How this was different from solving all the problems in
their algebra text in advance, writing them down, and
copying off the answers three months later was also not
mentioned.

I always did think Danny Dunn was a dope.

Or maybe I missed the point.  Either way, I liked Herbert's
computer better.  Uncle Horace sent Herbert a computer that
was surprisingly close to the truth in what it could and
could not do; it played chess and solved arithmetic
problems.  Herbert used it to do his arithmetic homework and
then got into trouble when he asked it to write a theme
about why it liked to live in smalltown.

   the point of the story was that using a computer to do
   your homework isn't cheating, because if you're going to
   tell a computer how to do something, you have to know how
   yourself.

I liked the gizmo with the crossbar thjat writes two copies
of whatever you happen to be writing at the time.  More
practible, it seemed to me, and also more dishonest.  But
completely unworkable for D.D., because he went to a school
with only one sixth-grade class, and so he and Joe couldn't
have handed in identical homework, even if they did vary the
handwriting with clever devices.

Followups to this should go elsewhere, but I'm not sure
where, so I sent it to dev-null.  Change the newsgroups line
if you follow up. 
-- 

		The wicked flee when no one pursueth.
Mark-Jason Dominus 	   ent...@pawl.rpi.EDU	     uunet!inco!alembic!entropy