The Early Notion of Machine-to-Machine Communication

This is perhaps the passage that sparked my early interest in machine-to-machine communication:

"Imagine...two computers conversing with each other over a period of time. The are then asked by a human being what they are talking about, and in the time he takes to post the question, the two computers have exchanged more words than the sum total of all the words exchanged by human beings since Homo sapiens first appeared on the earth 2 or 3 million years ago."

Simons, G. 1985. Silicon Shock: The Menace of the Computer. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

I used this in an early paper,

Schuster, Edmund W., Allen, Stuart J., 1995. A new framework for production planning in the process industries. In: 1995 APICS Conference Proceedings.

I do not think folks understood my vision. This was one of the early influences that led me to be receptive to the idea of the MIT Data Center Program.