He flicked on the terminal, and with violent confidence the line printer hammered out the words, HELLO. WHAT’S YOUR NAME. He typed in STEVE. The line printer hammered out HI STEVE WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO, and Steve Dompier was blown away. He later described it: “It was the magic machine that had intelligence. Of course I didn’t understand how it worked. But on everybody’s face you could see the same thing for the first four or five months until they understood it really wasn’t intelligent. That’s the addictive part, that first magic where this machine talks back to you and does mathematics
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