Survey of principles of logical design and of the elements of coding programs for large-scale digital computers, discussed from the user’s point of view. Brief descriptions of the logical structure of digital computers operating at M.I.T. and elsewhere. Interpretation of sequences of arithmetical and logical operations into digital computer instructions, with examples chosen from typical engineering, scientific, and business problems and from real-time control applications. Techniques for simplifying and improving the programming and operating of computers by the use of subroutines. Execution on the M.I.T. Whirlwind I computer of examples discussed in class to provide first-hand experience with automatic high-speed machines.

v. How Phyllis Was Won

You’re getting all of this?”

It was an awkward, side-of-the-mouth kind of ice-breaker, addressed to the tall sandy-haired girl as, having spotted her momentarily alone in the post-class rush and quickening his steps, Owen drew abreast of her in the long hall.

Her eyes as she darted to him in polite surprise were a blue so mild as to be gray, like her winter coat, which he thought of as the color of a dove in the distance. Her eyebrows and lashes were almost colorless, and her mouth as she spoke had an intriguing frozen quality, a delayed way of moving, her whole face delicate as if outlined in silverpoint, though shot through with living tints of pink. Her eyelids were pink, and the tip of her nose, and the crests of her slanted cheekbones. “Oh,” she said cautiously. “I think so. It’s all so lovely.” Her reply had a certain soft bounce to it, suggesting that she had been waiting for him to approach her, having sensed that he wanted to. They were some weeks into the course; leaves were turning, football was being played at more frivolous universities, and her nose still showed a bit of sunburn, achieved lying on a blanket in the grass, in the Great Court or down by the river. Strange, Owen thought, how sun-worshippers often have unsuitably fair skins.

He went on, in a voice that sounded whiny in his own ears, “I didn’t expect all this rather creepy mathematical logic, Frege and Russell and Gödel’s paradoxes—all this propositional calculus, my God, what a tempest in a hypothetical tea-pot! I thought we were going to learn how to program digital computers.”

“Oh, we will, I’m sure. But he’s”—the assistant professor who taught the course, whose name was Klein, his style murmurous and spasmodic and hard to follow—“leading up to something, a whole new way of looking at numbers, seeing them the way machines do instead of how we do.”