{"id":1620,"date":"2007-05-04T04:21:34","date_gmt":"2007-05-04T09:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=1620"},"modified":"2007-11-23T13:46:59","modified_gmt":"2007-11-23T18:46:59","slug":"desk-set-1957","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=1620","title":{"rendered":"Desk Set (1957)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Image<\/a>Desk Set (1957)<\/a> is a Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy movie about automation where Tracy, an engineer is brought in to automate the research department run by Bunny Watson (Hepburn.) There is a moment of interest to digital humanists when Tracy is showing off EMERAC:
\n<\/more><\/p>\n

Boss: Well there she is, EMERAC, the modern miracle …<\/p>\n

Richard Sumner (Tracy): The purpose of this machine, of course, is to free the worker…<\/p>\n

Bunny Watson (Hepburn): You can say that again…<\/p>\n

Sumner: …to free the worker from the routine and repetitive tasks and liberate his time for more important work.<\/p>\n

For example, you see all those books there … and the ones up there? Well, every fact in them has been fed into Emmy. What do you have there?<\/p>\n

Operator: This is Hamlet<\/p>\n

Boss: That’s Hamlet?<\/p>\n

Operator: Yes the entire text.<\/p>\n

Sumner: In code, of course… Now these little cards create electronic impulses which are accepted and retained by the machine so that in the future, if anyone calls up and wants a quotation from Hamlet the research worker types it into the machine here, Emmi goes to work, and the answer comes out here.<\/p>\n

Boss: And it never makes a mistake.<\/p>\n

Sumner: Well … Now that’s not entirely accurate. Emmy can make a mistake.<\/p>\n

Bunny: Ha ha…<\/p>\n

Sumner: But only if the human element makes the mistake first.<\/p>\n

Boss: Tell me Bunny, has EMERAC been helping you any?<\/p>\n

Bunny: Well frankly it hasn’t started to give yet. For the past two weeks we’ve been feeding it information. But I think you could safely say that it will provide more leisure for more people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is an image of EMERAC on Flickr<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Desk Set (1957) is a Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy movie about automation where Tracy, an engineer is brought in to automate the research department run by Bunny Watson (Hepburn.) There is a moment of interest to digital humanists when Tracy is showing off EMERAC: Boss: Well there she is, EMERAC, the modern miracle … … Continue reading Desk Set (1957)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-of-computing-and-multimedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}