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and 3. But Berkeley designed his “little idiot,” as he referred
to Simon, not as a scientific tool but as an educational aid “to
exhibit in simple understandable form the essential principle of
any artificial brain.”
4
Berkeley's ideas inspired others to explore ways of bringing
knowledge of computers and their role in modern society to the
attention of educators, electronics hobbyists, and even children.
One such person was Joseph Weisbecker, an
RCA
computer
development engineer. His computer career spanned many areas,
from the design of mainframe computer hardware to micro-
processor and microcomputer architectures. But demystifying
the little-understood world of digital computing, and making
computers part of everyday experience, was his true passion, an
enthusiasm that he picked up from Berkeley. “When my father
read Edmund Berkeley's book
Giant Brains
,” explained Weis-
becker's daughter Joyce,
he saw for the first time what an electronic computer
could do, but, more importantly, *how* it worked. Binary
logic, flip-flops, switching circuits - very simple elements
combined in subtle, clever ways resulted in surprisingly
sophisticated behavior from a machine. And, better than
mechanical gears and levers, this machine could be made
to completely change its behavior without rebuilding it.
Now *this* was magic!
By the end of the 1960s, Weisbecker's interest in computer edu-
cation and low-cost computing converged into a computer con-
cept that he referred to as a Flexible Recreational and Educa-
tional Device, or
FRED
. Weisbecker envisioned
FRED
not as
yet another computer toy, like the many he had designed in the
past, but as a real, minimum-cost, general-purpose computer
for home and school applications. “Everything that my father
did with computers was an attempt to get as much of a
FRED
