jjm (03/16/83)
Anyone interested in computers in SF should read "When Harlie was One" by David Gerrold (author of the Trouble with Tribbles episode of Star Trek). Harlie is a program (Human Analog Robot - Life Input Equivalents) that is intelligent. It designs the Graphic Omniscient Device (GOD) which will be able to answer the questions that HARLIE can not answer. For you Hitchhiker's Guide fans, Doug Adams seems to have stolen a lot from this book. (In his book, a computer named Deep Thought designs a computer to question the ultimate answer....) Another computer book is "The Adolescence of P1", about a spontaneously intelligent program which escapes from it's programmer. The program supposedly finds that there is a special hardware facility in all IBM equipment which allows the military to take over the hardware in case of emergency. The program breaks the security code on this and spreads copies of itself to all IBM machines... Rather absurd. The only reason I bought the stupid book was that it "looked" accurate. (There was a picture of an ADM-3A on the cover; it was the closest thing to a picture of real computer hardware I have ever seen on a book cover. What's that old saying about book covers?) The Adolescence of P1 is a "must miss". Jim McParland American Bell - Holmdel hou5e!jjm