The Future of Big Data: Distilling Less Knowledge Per Bit
Money Quote: “It is both unknowable and all-knowing. It answers all questions, if only we know how to interpret those answers.”
Photo: WITCH
Year: 1951
Short for the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell, the WITCH was also known as The Harwell Dekatron Computer. It was slow (a multiplication took 5-10 seconds), but this was justified by its ability to run long periods of time unattended. It could therefore be left on its own with a large amount of input data. At one point it was left running over the Christmas and New Year holiday and was still working when the staff came back 10 days later. – Courtesy of Pingdom via Wired
