The wonderful thing about the F&T was that it didn’t matter what time you arrived. If a group of hungry programmers and mathematicians showed up at seven in the morning wanting meat loaf, roast turkey, or fried fish, that’s what they served.
We sat shoulder to shoulder with Nobel Prize-winning scientists who had also been up all night chasing ideas.
At the time, none of us thought we were building anything grand.
We were just experimenting with computers.
A paging trick here. A language feature there. A strange little program that played with patterns in text. Each of us worked on some tiny corner of the machine.
We saw the problems up close, in the small. The machine in front of us. The code we were trying to make behave.
Most of the time it felt like tinkering.
But over the years, those small ideas accumulated. One improvement made another possible. One experiment suggested the next. Slowly, the machines grew more capable, and the things people tried to do with them grew more ambitious.
None of that felt inevitable at the time.
It just felt like curiosity.
Only much later did I begin to realize that some of those small experiments—especially the ones involving patterns in text—were pointing toward something much larger.
In the next article, I’ll come back to those early pattern tricks and show how they eventually evolved into the systems people today call artificial intelligence.