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THE CURSE OF THE COMPUTER
By Dan Gutman

Who knows what evil lurks in the brains of computers?

In a remarkable article in the new issue of "American Heritage of
Invention & Technology," it is revealed that just about every one of
the men involved in the birth of the computer died a horrible death.

The first to go was Alan Turing, a Cambridge mathematician who made
his biggest contribution to the birth of The Information Age when he
was just 25-years-old.

In a 1937 paper titled, "On Computable Numbers," Turing proposed an
imaginary machine that could follow coded instructions and execute
certain computations--the basic idea of a general-purpose
programmable computer.

Turing, an eccentric who would occasionally wear a gas mask to ward
off hay fever, was only 41 when he died in 1954.  He had been
convicted of propositioning a teenage boy in England, and was
offered the choice of going to prison or undergoing hormone
treatments.  Turing opted for the hormones.

After discovering that he was growing breasts, he put together a
batch of cyanide in his home laboratory and killed himself.

John Von Neumann was the first person to come up with the idea that
computers should be general purpose machines that could execute a
wide variety of programs.  He is often credited as the father of the
computer, and also designed the high-explosive charges for the
atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

A year after Turing's suicide, Von Neumann was diagnosed with bone
cancer.  He lived with excruciating pain for two years before
mercifully passing away in 1957.

Kurt Goedel, a brilliant mathematician who had escaped from
Nazi-occupied Austria to live and work in the United States, was the
first to propose that any statement could be put into the form of
numbers--the basis of digital information.  His two papers in 1931
had wide ranging influence on the creation of the first primitive
computers.

After his wife underwent surgery and had to be placed in a nursing
home in 1977, Goedel refused to take any food and starved himself to
death.

His death certificate cited "malnutrition and inanition caused by
personality disturbance."

John Mauchly was one of the creators of ENIAC, the first electronic
computer, and UNIVAC, the first commercially successful computer.

Mauchly never received credit or financial reward for his work,  and
at the end of his life he said, bitterly, "We've got down to the
point where maybe we can buy some hot dogs with our Social
Security."

He died from a disfiguring genetic disease in 1980.

Was the invention of the computer cursed?  It's almost as if some
supernatural force chose to punish those involved with its creation.

"The Curse of the Computer" has not befallen the current generation
of computer pioneers.  But if my name was Bill Gates or Steve Jobs,
I'd make sure to get regular checkups.