Happy 60th Birthday, Computer!

Exactly sixty years ago, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, mathematician John von Neumann began seeking funding to build a machine that would do this at electronic speeds. "I am sure that the projected device, or rather the species of devices of which it is to be the first representative, is so radically new that many of its uses will become clear only after it has been put into operation," he wrote to Lewis Strauss on 24 October 1945. "Uses which are likely to be the most important are by definition those which we do not recognize at present because they are farthest removed from our present sphere."