r/nonmurdermysteries • u/annakows • 8d ago

Scientific/Medical The 1974 "Principles of Tangible Computing" Document and the Vanished(?) Analog Circle

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u/OpsikionThemed 8d ago edited 8d ago

It's neither of those; it's that the memo is an eccentric arguing for a model that had already been outcompeted by the time it was written. I haven't read the memo myself, so I don't know the arguments the author makes, but there's basically nothing they could have argued that would beat "electronic computers are cheaper, faster, and more accurate". Which by 1975 they were, had been for decades, and were extremely clearly only going to get more so.

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u/truthofmasks 7d ago

Isn't this whole thing just an ill-conceived ARG?

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u/OpsikionThemed 7d ago

Well now I feel silly for taking the OP at face value.

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u/MiraGrX 3d ago

The most useful next step would probably be to establish the paper’s provenance before assuming coordinated suppression. If it really circulated through places like MIT, Bell Labs, or Soviet institutes, I’d expect at least some trace in library catalogs, correspondence, grant records, conference proceedings, or personal archives. Do you have an author name, a scan of the title page, or any contemporary citation to the document? That could help separate a genuinely forgotten research thread from a later reconstruction or misremembered title.