There was also an era of “human computers”, and when someone ultimately decided to automate their jobs away, people gradually realized that a computer could do things we never thought of as computation before, and that information could be encoded as numbers, and a lot of wild things like that.
One thing I learned in college was a means of encoding a secret: n people all learn a separate point on the curve and the degree of the polynomial for the curve, and you encode the secret as the Y-intercept. That way any k of n of those people (depending on the degree of the polynomial) can recover the secret. I thought, that’s not so hard, and I asked why this wasn’t discovered centuries ago. It’s because encoding arbitrary information as a number is an idea that never occurred to anyone before computers, aside from things like bible codes and numerology that are usually lossy anyway. But you can do this with a pad and paper if you wanted.
Who was the guy who patiently explained IN THE 70S to an interviewer why general purpose computers would be needed? I remember hearing the interview and the guy genuinely couldn’t fathom why they’d be needed to replace regular libraries and so on.
One thing I learned in college was a means of encoding a secret: n people all learn a separate point on the curve and the degree of the polynomial for the curve, and you encode the secret as the Y-intercept. That way any k of n of those people (depending on the degree of the polynomial) can recover the secret. I thought, that’s not so hard, and I asked why this wasn’t discovered centuries ago. It’s because encoding arbitrary information as a number is an idea that never occurred to anyone before computers, aside from things like bible codes and numerology that are usually lossy anyway. But you can do this with a pad and paper if you wanted.