Nonetheless, McCarthy's talk had an impact, not least because at the very end of it he finally stated in public what he'd long been mulling over in private: "If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future," he said, "then computation may someday be organized as a public utility, just as the telephone system is a public utility. We can envisage computer service companies whose subscribers are connected to them by telephone lines. Each subscriber needs to pay only for the capacity that he actually uses, but he has access to all programming languages characteristic
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