That uneasy stare at alien nature

Abstract

Here I wish to argue that computing is profoundly and perpetually ambiguous in this sense, and so wonder‐producing. I want to explicate this wonder and ask what its value is for scholarship. But by now, I expect, my patient reader is wanting to know why I make such a case for computing, especially in a Festschrift. My answer is simply this. As a pioneer in the field the man honoured here first encountered computing when its strangeness was utterly unavoidable. The beginner’s Pisgah‐sight he and others among us were afforded then, before progress in hardware and software engineering made that daunting encounter of strangeness and wonderment mostly a thing of the past, constitutes not just an interesting historiographical problem to work on, with a fascinating history to recover, but an urgently needed source of guidance for us now. That history is our future.