Sometimes a problem will seem completely insurmountable. Then someone comes up with a simple new idea, or just a rearrangement of old ideas, that completely eliminates it.
With the appearance of communications networks and interconnected computers, we got the world wide web, and it changed the lives of most people, I think.
Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.
Once when I was standing at the base, they started rotating the set and a big, heavy wrench fell down from the 12 o'clock position of the set, and got buried in the ground a few feet from me. I could have been killed!
Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
