As winter took away outdoor spaces from the students, they crowded after class and in the evenings into the luncheonettes and cafeterias and cheap Chinese and Indian restaurants of Kendall Square—not yet a high-tech Oz but a pocket of low-end industry darkened by a century’s grime—and the southern end of Central Square. Doors swung open to admit sharp drafts of snow-flecked air with fresh arrivals, and mirrors sweated as the heat of the packed bodies interfaced with the cold walls. Wedged around a Formica-topped table with three or four others of Phyllis’s set—Anne-Marie Morand from Montreal, Amy Toong from Boston, Jake Lowenthal from Flatbush, Bobby Sprock from Chicopee—Owen admired the way she listened, said so little, just fed cigarettes into those pale, numb lips and exhaled up into her dirty-blond bangs. She had the magnetism of those who make no effort to shine; she held them together, many actors playing to an audience of one. Noisy, fast-talking Jake was mocking the first digital computers: Harvard’s Mark I, ENIAC down in Philly, the Lincoln Laboratories Whirlwind housed a few blocks from where they sat. “Mountains that don’t produce a mouse,” he proclaimed. “Thousands of switches, boxes and boxes of punch cards, miles of wiring, tons of hardware all to do what a slide rule and half a brain can do in thirty seconds.”

“Jake, you don’t believe that,” Phyllis told him, so levelly and quietly Owen felt a jealous pang: a well-established connection was being used.

“Why don’t I? Hey, Phyl, why don’t I? By the time ENIAC was built, the war was over and the Army couldn’t use it. It was a thirty-ton dog. It takes two hundred kilowatts to run it, it gobbles up electricity even when it isn’t running, it costs a fortune just to keep the tubes cool—there are eighteen thousand of them. Eighteen thousand tubes. Not to mention ten thousand condensers and six thousand switches.”

“Yes, and it does math it would take thousands of people to do by hand,” Amy Toong said, glancing quickly sideways to check that Phyllis, to whom Jake had spoken, was not replying.

“You’re talking obsolete,” Bobby Sprock told Jake. “Vacuum tubes are on the way out. Already, Whirlwind’s storage unit uses magnetic cores instead of tubes. Punch cards are being replaced by magnetic tapes. Bell Labs has come up with something called a transistor that does the switching with semi-conducting strips of silicon and doped germanium. Circuitry is going to be all thin-film layering soon. Pretty soon we’ll have a computer no bigger than a refrigerator.”