Richard Brautigan was an American author and poet who, in 1967’s Summer of Love in San Francisco, published ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, wishing for a future in which computers could save humans from drudgery, (such as performing statistical operations by hand?)
Apart from the perkier PDP ‘mini-computers’, computers of Brautigan’s day were hulking behemoths with more brawn than brain, and a scary dark side, as seen through HAL in 1968’s ‘2001: The Space Odyssey’.
Brautigan’s poem applied sweet 1960’s kandy-green hues to these cold & clanging monsters, just a few years away from friendly little Apple and other micro’s of the 70’s & 80’s. Now we are all linked on the web, and if we get tired of that we can talk to the electronic aide and confidante Siri, developed at Menlo Park, California – not too far away in space, if not time, from where Brautigan wrote.
We can get a glimpse of a ‘rosy’ future in the even friendlier electronic personality operating system of Spike Jonze’s new movie ‘Her’.
In his BBC documentaries of 2011, named after Brautigan’s poem, filmmaker Adam Curtis argues that computers have not liberated humanity much, if at all.
Yet there is still something about Richard Brautigan’s original 1967 poem, something still worth wishing for!
All three verses, further information and audio of Mr Brautigan reading his poem can be found at
http://www.brautigan.net/machines.html
CSIRAC, a real-life Australian digital dinosaur, that stomped the earth from 1949 to 1964, and is the only intact but dormant (hopefully!) first generation computer left anywhere in the world, can be viewed on the lower ground floor of the Melbourne Museum.
(and yes, this computer was used for statistical analyses, as well as other activities, such as composing electronic music)
Synergistic Statistical Consulting, Analysis, Arboronics 