an aura of necessity about them - objects whose presence was needed, essential, whose services were sought for aims I was eagerly trying to envision.
There was the Olivetti typewriter. That was one thing in the house whose noisy presence was almost incessantly felt. My father was an early bird: he would wake up naturally at four in the morning, promptly get up, raise all the curtains, open all the windows and turn on all the lights in the house, presumably with the intention to show widely to the neighborhood the virtuous hard worker that he was, and prevent anybody else from having a good sleep until a more humane hour of the day. He would fix himself coffee and then sit at the typewriter and work away until it was time for me to get up and get ready for school. My mother, on the contrary, was not a morning person, to say the least. She would begin working in the evening, after my father had already gone to sleep and I was also put to bed. The typewriter was back in use then and she would keep on working through the night. Ordinarily, she would go to sleep shortly before the time when my father woke up in the morning, but unfortunately their schedule was not always to carefully timed. The worst times of the day, besides the meal times, were the brief periods in the evenings or in the mornings when their waking time accidentally overlapped.
There finally came the day when I was allowed my share of the use of the typewriter, in the hours of the afternoon, when I was back from school. I perceived that as an important step into the slow and painful rite of passage that gradually gives access to the world of grownups. Being able to type my own writings acquired an enormous importance to me, be it uncertain poems, musings over plants and minerals, or summaries of my readings about the distant civilization of the Pacific islands. I felt that by typing them up I was giving my own thoughts more weight, more credibility in the currency of the adult world, where thoughts of children are so easily dismissed as irrelevant. I typed anything I happened to think about: descriptions of chemical experiments, short stories, dreams, summaries of books.
I was fascinated by the typewriter and the strange distribution of letters on the keyboard, so different from the order in which children were asked to recite the alphabet in first grade. When I was told that the letters have been distributed in that order to slow down the typing so that it would not jam the machine I was flabbergasted: I typed slowly then, with just one or two fingers, and I had barely learned how to find the letters in the right places on the keyboard. I could hardly imagine somebody typing so fast as to jam the machine. I was even told that the order of letters on the keyboard had to be designed in different ways for different languages, because letters occur with different frequencies, and that got me to regard these machine with even more of a sense of wonder.
There were other mechanisms, no less fascinating. The adding machine looked almost like a typewriter, with a keyboard and a lever, but it did something magnificent and mysterious: it added and multiplied numbers! It took a longer time for me to gain access to the adding machine: it probably was a more expensive piece of equipment and my parents feared, rightly, that I might try to take it apart to find out how it worked. Finally, after I promised repeatedly that I would not try to open it and take the mechanism apart, I was allowed to use it. It was hard to resist the temptation to do exactly what I had promised not to do: I wanted to know how a simple punching of keys and turning of a wheel could perform what I thought only a sentient being was able, sometime with effort, to achieve. Musing over the adding machine, trying to imagine how it might have worked, without having the possibility to verify my hypotheses, was probably what got me to develop an early attraction for the idea of automated computation and I started dreaming the dream of our modern civilization, the dream of intelligent machines. It would be a few years still until I could get my hands on my first computer, but the germs of the fascination I felt with it when the time came had been planted already with the mechanical keys and wheels of the old adding machine.
The most exciting of all the object of the grownup world that surrounded me was certainly the slide ruler. It was a beautiful piece cast in ivory, which had once belonged to my paternal grandfather, the engineer, who had passed it on to my father when he became a student of architecture. This was no adding machine. There was no hidden mechanism to explore or guess: the functioning was all in full sight and very simple apparently. I understood that I had reached a further step in conceptual abstraction, where the difficulty of things did not lie in the complicated way in which a mechanism is assembled (that had always been for me, up to that point, the notion of "complicated") but in something conceptual that resides entirely inside the mind. There was a concept, a mathematical one, by virtue of which the mechanism turned something apparently trivial, like sliding two narrow plates one past the other, into a sophisticated calculation. Something called logarithms. And there were books with tables of logarithms which were consulted in the process of calculation. The slide ruler gave me a different sense of curiosity, not the maverick desire to take mechanisms apart to see how their building blocks are put together, but a sense of longing for deeper understanding, for getting hold of the key that opens the door of meaning.
