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This programming is sponsored by

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Central Market, featuring daily floral

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deliveries with an array of

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seasonal blooms, bouquets, and custom

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arrangements. More at centralmarket.com. This

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is the Engines of Our Ingenuity,

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made possible by the friends of

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KUHF Houston. Today,

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an analogy game. The University of

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Houston's College of Engineering presents this

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series about the machines that make

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our civilization run. And

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the people whose ingenuity created them. I've

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often said that we and our machines

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mirror one another. Yet it is

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a strange mirror. What do we really see

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when we look at a machine? We don't

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see ourselves at first because of a time

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lag in the reflection. What happened when you

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first looked at a computer? You

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felt neither need nor empathy for

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it. We can't need what we've

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never experienced. Yet that first glimpse

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began a long process. You

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have friends who still jitter around this

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new medium, wondering whether to accept the

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change it'll bring into their lives or

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keep dodging it. The need

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for transformation lies at our

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biological core. But we fear

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change nonetheless. The first

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computers I ever used filled rooms.

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We had to speak to them

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with punched cards. The simplest conversations

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stretched into weeks. We'd submit three-inch

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decks of cards, wait 24 hours,

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and be handed a 500-page sheaf

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of nonsense output because a do-loop

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went mad when we misplaced a

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period. Even as we

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computed things that had been quite beyond

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us a few years before, we became

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desperately frustrated during the 1960s. All

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we talked about was increasing the

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speed of calculation. But what

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we really needed was a more

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accurate mirror of our human nature.

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During the 1970s, we finally began

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speaking to computers directly with keyboards.

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Then we realized we could compose text and

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print it out. Of course, the

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computer took no responsibility for organizing

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the text, so we began demanding

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that word processing logic be built

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into the computer. The early nineteen

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eighties brought in the invention of

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software can sets of commands we

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could call up from the keyboard

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software now processed our words in

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it laid out spreadsheets. New programming

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languages remove the burden of speaking

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in the language of the machines.

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They became more fluent in human

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tongues. If the computers become more

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humans, we've been adapting. To the

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computer. At the same time, we've

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changed our work habits and are

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prose. We've changed what we expect of

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human communication. The computer has swallowed

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up our old algorithms of multiplication and

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long division. Meanwhile, like another human

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being, the computer does more and more

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of its work behind our back,

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so images flow back and forth

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in the mirror of our machines. How

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much thought did we give to

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the first I B M computers isolated

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in cleaned rooms with their big

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tape drives? When my father. Saw his

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first automobile chatting by in Illinois Cornfield.

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He had no idea he would see

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city's completely reshaped by that primitive device,

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nor did he have any idea how

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cars would shape themselves to human bodies

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and human responses. He had no more

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idea nineteen Hundred than I did in

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Nineteen Fifty Nine. When a student in

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my research group told me he was

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using a computer to do one of

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our calculations, if he told me he

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was changing human history, I would have

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laughed at him, but he was, for

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he had begun. The very mirroring

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process that shapes the human species.

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I'm John Lean Hard at the

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University of Houston, where we're interested

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in the way in that in

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mind.