[COFF] Quote from Wilkes

[cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo Nusquam)]

I am currently reading "Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer" by Maurice 
Wilkes, MIT press.  The following text from p. 145 may amuse readers.

[p. 145] By June 1949 people had begun to realize that it was not so 
easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared.  I well 
remember then this realization first came on me with full force.  The 
EDSAC was on the top floor of the building and the tape-punching and 
editing equipment one floor below [...].  I was trying to get working my 
first non-trivial program, which was one for the numerical integration 
of Airy's differential equation.  It was on one of my journeys between 
the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that "hesitating at the angles 
of stairs" the realization came over me with full force that a good part 
of the remainder of my life was going to spent in finding errors in my 
own programs.

N.