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May 28, 2005
Fischer Black and external memories
Tyler Cowen quotes (summarizes?) from a biography of Fischer Black:He did almost all of his work in an outlining program called ThinkTank, which he used as a kind of external associative emmory to supplement his own. Everything he read, every conversation he had, every thought that occurred, everything got summarized and added to the data base that swelled eventually to 20 million bytes organized in 2000 alphabetical files...Reading, discussion and thinking that Fischer did outside the office was recorded on slips to paper to be entered into the database later. Reading, discussion, and thinking that took place inside the office was recorded directly. While he was on the phone, he was typing. While he was talking to you in person, he was typing. Sometimes he even typed while he was interviewing a prospective job candidate, looking at the screen not the candidate.
My memory is pretty good but about two years ago I had to give in and offload my scheduling memory to a PDA. I haven't tried offloading my actual memory yet. Any EG readers try something realy extensive like this and want to share the results?
Posted by ekr at May 28, 2005 8:39 AM | Filed under: