“By June 1949 people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get programs right as at one time appeared. I well remember when this realization first came on me with full force.
The EDSAC was on the top floor of the building and the tape-punching and editing equipment one floor below. […] It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that "hesitating at the angles of stairs" the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.”

— Maurice Wilkes

Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer, MIT Press, 1985, p. 145. (The quoted phrase is from T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral.)

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Maurice Wilkes 7

British computer scientist 1913–2010

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