Today I was looking through Nick Monfort’s excellent essay Continuous Paper: Print Interfaces and Early Computer Writing today and noticed something very interesting-

invited by IBM to write a story using a computer in 1973. Calvino had the protagonist of “The Burning of the Abominable House,” the story which resulted, use punch cards to feed data into the computer. But according to Calvino’s wife, the limited computer access in Paris, where they were living at the time, meant that Calvino worked by “carrying out all the operations the computer was supposed to do himself.”[16] Paper seems to have been the whole mechanism, not just the interface, for his foray into computing.

I never knew about this! I haven’t had the opportunity to read Calvino’s short stories before, but I’ll have to pick this one up soon.

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