Roen was speechless. “You… were spying on me!”
Stephen laughed. “Let’s say we used you as an unpaid intelligence consultant.”

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures....
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. […] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

And programming computers was so fascinating. You create your own little universe, and then it does what you tell it to do.

Even Magnifico was put to work on the calculating machine for routine computations, a type of work, which, once explained, was a source of great amusement to him and at which he was surprisingly proficient.

It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple,

I made virtual animals in the computer, life-forms subject to an artificial evolution. I also went walking a lot on the beach and in the streets of Scheveningen for inspiration for my columns. Since 1986 I have been writing pieces for national daily on matters that interest me. Often these are technical things, fantasies or musings.

I dreamed of a friendly machine to which you could delegate all those manual tasks which are prone to errors. A machine that could quietly learn and perform tasks, that could store simple data and instructions, that could be used by anyone, that would be inexpensive and the size of other office products which people used. I had to create a new language which did not need interpreters in white coats.

Careers were made. Bletchley, meanwhile, also proved a haven for thinking about computation: Bombes were machines, and they ran programs to solve problems that humans, by themselves, could not.

His hand contracted on the odd carven rod, a tiny thing that glittered with hints of lights and circuits and, at the same time, bone and gems, a wand constructed by an engineer, or a transmitter assembled by a shaman.

This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.

We were just building stuff 'cause we thought it was cool. I do remember having these specific conversations with my friends where we thought, you know, someone is gonna build this. Someone is gonna build something that makes it so that people can stay connected with their friends and their family, but no way would we be the ones who were contributing to, kinda, leading the whole Internet in this direction.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

It built itself up endlessly, like a chess game, and the telemetrists began to use a computer to program the computer that designed the program for the computer that programmed the robot-controlling computer.