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26 Oct 2010 /

the meaning of information technology

By nick kallen

A polemic posted by Nick Kallen, an engineer at Twitter on wordpress.com on November 2, 2009 at 2:00 am, proposing that the essence of technology is to create “heaps”.

“The first commercial computer was the Lyons Electronic Office I and was used in 1951 to perform vast calculations pertaining to the making and consumption of biscuits. You see, after the war, J. Lyons & Co., a popular chain of British tea shops, was confronted with an appetite for pastries so astronomical (which is understandable given years of tedious disputes with Germany), that the human mind was incapable of solving unaided the problem of distributing tea cakes to their customers…”

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