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Time to Learn About Polymorphics; or, What the Internet Looked Like in 1959

Whether via Babbage, Moore, or Kurzweil, computing has a powerful ability to predict its own future. (As for Raymond Kurzweil, if not the almighty Singularity than Deep Blue at least.) It does this better than any other technology--look back on, say...

Whether via Babbage, Moore, or Kurzweil, computing has a powerful ability to predict its own future. (As for Raymond Kurzweil, if not the almighty Singularity than Deep Blue at least.) It does this better than any other technology—look back on, say, aviation or long-distance communication for comparison. Blame the fundamental purity of logic and math for spiking the imagination just right.

John Salzer made this stop-motion film in 1959 based on an essay by Simon Ramo, the space/flight engineering force-of-nature who brought us the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. It predicts, quite cutely, the social internet of the future by way of explaining polymorphic computing, the idea of a computer adapting itself to different uses, a technology finally achieved in 2007.

Via the Internet Archive (via Brain Pickings).