Automating the Elevator
Back in the days, there were elevator operators, people whose job was to go up and down in an elevator all day, stopping at the right floors to take on and let off passengers. Now imagine what happened when it became possible
Virtual Machines
A virtual machine is what you get when you impose a particular pattern of instructions (more literally, dispositions) on a real machine that has lots of plasticity—interacting parts that can be in many different states. Since a virtual machine does informational work,
The Seven Secrets of Computer Power Revealed
SECRET 1: Competence without Comprehension: Something—e.g., a register machine—can do perfect arithmetic without having to comprehend what it is doing. SECRET 2: What a number in a register stands for depends on the program that we have composed. SECRET 3: Since a