p. 17.
“

I just looked in the phone book, and called up the Executive Officer of the Servomechanisms Laboratory (Al Sise) and said, "I'm a math graduate student and would like a summer job. If you could find an electrical engineering student, I'm sure by the end of the summer we could make you an electronic calculator that would beat the pants off that little mechanical thing that Wiener has put together. Are you interested?"

— Douglas T. Ross

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "I just looked in the phone book, and called up the Executive Officer of the Servomechanisms Laboratory (Al Sise) and said, "I'm a math graduate student and would like a summer job. If you could find an electrical engineering student, I'm sure by the end of the summer we could make you an electronic calculator that would beat the pants off that little mechanical thing that Wiener has put together. Are you interested?"" in the context of "p. 17." to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Douglas T. Ross" (Quotes, An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1984): "An Interview with Douglas T. Ross" Conducted by William Aspray on 21 February 1984, Waltham, MA) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Douglas T. Ross

About Douglas T. Ross

Douglas Taylor "Doug" Ross (December 21, 1929 – January 31, 2007) was an American computer scientist pioneer, and Chairman of SofTech, Inc. He is most famous for originating the term CAD for computer-aided design, and is considered to be the father of Automatically Programmed Tools (APT) a language to drive numerically controlled manufacturing.