But there may also be a kind of talent that gets suppressed by time, a talent diffused within the human gene pool, which lies dormant awaiting its technological moment. One of the fathers of computer science, Donald E. Knuth, speculates that this was the case with computer programming. In a series of interviews published in Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth, he is quoted as saying: I’ve noticed that one out of every fifty people, more or less, has the peculiar way of thinking that makes them resonate with computers. Long ago, such people were scattered among many other disciplines, which didn’t quite suit their abilities, but they discovered each other when computer science was established as a separate field. I mean, I think it’s likely that one out of every fifty people who built the pyramids, ages ago, would probably have been a great programmer if computers had existed in ancient Egypt. In another conversation, Knuth refers to these born programmers as “geeks.” This used to be the name for carnival performers portraying wild men, but it had long since been reapplied to denote socially graceless eccentrics who might also be dedicated to a special field.
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