When the Institute for Advanced Study agreed, against all objections, to allow von Neumann and his group to build a computer, the concern was that the refuge of the mathematicians would be disturbed by the presence of engineers. No one imagined the extent to which, on the contrary, the symbolic logic that had been the preserve of the mathematicians would unleash the powers of coded sequences upon the world. “In those days we were all so busy doing what we were doing we didn’t think very much about this enormous explosion that might happen,” says Willis Ware.
