The computer, one might well conclude, was conceived in sin. Its birth helped ratchet up, by several orders of magnitude, the destructive force available to the superpowers during the cold war. And the man most responsible for the creation of that first computer, John von Neumann, was himself among the most ardent of the cold warriors, an advocate of a preemptive military attack on the Soviet Union, and one of the models for the film character Dr. Strangelove. “The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time,” the historian of science George Dyson has
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