An electronic brain. What would you do with one of those, if you had one? In 1940, you’d probably stick it in a machine of some kind. Not one of Dr. Satan’s rec

An electronic brain. What would you do with one of those, if you had one? In 1940, you’d probably stick it in a machine of some kind. Not one of Dr. Satan’s recycled Atlantean robots, but something practical. Say a machine that could weld leaf-springs in a Milwaukee tractor factory. This, really, is about what science fiction writers call “Steam Engine Time”. The observable fact that steam, contained, exerts force, has been around since the first lid rattled as the soup came to a boil. The ancient Greeks built toy steam engines that whirled brass globes. But you won’t get a locomotive ‘til it’s Steam Engine Time. What you wouldn’t do, in 1940, with an electronic brain, would be to stick it on your desk, connect it somehow to a typewriter, and, if you, had one, a television of the sort demonstrated at the 1939 Worlds fair in New York. At which point it would start to resemble… But it’s not Steam Engine Time yet, so you can’t do that. Although you would, or anyway you’d think about it, if you were a man named Vannevar Bush, but we’ll come back to him later. Vannevar Bush almost single-handedly invented what we now think of as the military-industrial complex. He did that for Franklin Roosevelt, but it isn’t what he’ll be remembered for. http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive.asp http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive...