{"id":38043,"date":"2011-08-11T00:37:19","date_gmt":"2011-08-11T00:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/when-alexander-fleming-who-discovered-penicillin\/"},"modified":"2011-08-11T00:37:19","modified_gmt":"2011-08-11T00:37:19","slug":"when-alexander-fleming-who-discovered-penicillin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/when-alexander-fleming-who-discovered-penicillin\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

When Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, died in 1955, a Milan newspaper headlined, \u201cStop the reader! Fleming has died; maybe you, too, owe your life to him.\u201d A similar phrase could be used today for all those who at this moment are in front of their computers. If a technological holiness exists, I believe I have had the privilege of meeting it: it had the face of Fr. Busa. So kneel down you too, reader, in front of the mortal remains of this old priest, linguist, philosopher and computer expert. If you surf the Internet, it is thanks to him. If you jump from one site to another, clicking on links highlighted in blue, it is thanks to him. If you use a pc to write emails and documents, it is thanks to him. If you can read this article, it is thanks to him.
\nThe computer was born originally only for the purpose of making calculations \u2013 to compute, hence its name: computer. But Fr. Busa instilled it with the gift of words. It was 1949. The Jesuit had it in mind to analyze the complete works of St. Thomas: one and a half million lines, nine million words (compared to just 100,000 of the Divine Comedy). He had already compiled 10,000 index cards by hand, just for the inventory of the preposition \u201cin\u201d which he considered important from a philosophical point of view. He was looking for a way to connect single fragments of Aquinas\u2019 thought with other sources.
\nOn a trip to the United States, Fr. Busa asked to meet Thomas Watson, founder of IBM. The magnate received him in his office in New York. Listening to the Italian priest\u2019s request, Watson shook his head, \u201cIt\u2019s not possible to make a machine do what you are asking. You are more American than we are!\u201d Fr. Busa then took a business card out of his pocket, which he had found on a desk with the motto of IBM, coined by the boss, \u201cThink.\u201d And the phrase, \u201cThe difficult we can do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.\u201d He gave it back to Watson, disappointed.
\nBusa had touched a raw nerve, and the President of IBM responded, \u201cOK, Father. We\u2019ll try, but on one condition: promise me that you won\u2019t change the name of IBM, International Business Machines, into International Busa Machines!\u201d
\nFrom this challenge between two geniuses, hypertext was born \u2013 the information structure which allows a dynamic connection between texts, consulted with the click of a mouse.
\nThe term, hypertext, was coined by Ted Nelson, in 1965, for software which was able to memorize the history of the actions of a user. But, as the author of Literary Machines admits, the idea was born before the invention of the computer. And as Antonio Zoppetti, linguistic and computer expert, attests, it was Fr. Busa who really worked on hypertext at least 15 years before Nelson.
\nBetween Pisa, Boulder Colorado and Venice, the Jesuit gave life to a titanic effort which lasted almost half a century, investing one million and 800,000 hours, more or less what it would take if one man worked for 1,000 years at regular hours. Today, the results are available on CD-ROM and paper, in 56 volumes for a total of 70,000 pages. From the first volume, published in 1951, Busa catalogued all of the words in the 118 books of St. Thomas and sixty-one other authors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

L’Osservatore Romano, Lettore fermati! \u00c3\u0088 morto padre Busa<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, died in 1955, a Milan newspaper headlined, \u201cStop the reader! Fleming has died; maybe you, too, owe your life to him.\u201d A similar phrase could be used today for all those who at this moment are in front of their computers. If a technological holiness exists, I believe I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[1539],"class_list":["post-38043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","tag-emergent-digital-practices","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-9TB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}