Eleven Tons Of Relays

The Aperture Science Interactive Machine occupies the whole of Sub-Level 4, draws more current than the commissary, runs at nine hundred degrees at bank four, and cannot add. It has never been able to add. It can, however, be spoken to, and management considers that the more important of the two capabilities.

Dictated by Cave Johnson, President & Founder, over the objection of the department

11Tons of relaysOrdered twice

1Punch-card readerSecond-hand

1TeletypeSo he can argue with it

900°Fahrenheit at bank fourGreg’s problem

0Sums correctly performedTo date

The relay stock arrived in 1954 because a purchase order was signed twice on the same Tuesday by a man who does not usually sign purchase orders at all, on a day when the person who does sign them was not in the building. Eleven tons of relays turned up at the loading dock and there was nowhere to put them and no honest way to send them back.

So I told the machine shop to build something out of them. That is not how the outfit in New Mexico begins a research programme. It is how this one began three of its four best ones.

The department was formed the following month around the question of what eleven tons of relays are for. Their first answer was arithmetic. They spent two years on arithmetic. The machine does not do arithmetic. It has never once carried a column correctly and the department has proved, formally, on paper, that it cannot.

Their second answer is the one this company is now funding, and it is the reason this sheet exists, and it is that the machine can be spoken to. You put a question in on a card. It puts an answer out on the tape. The answer is very often wrong, occasionally impertinent, and approximately once a fortnight about something nobody asked it.

APERTURE SCIENCE INTERACTIVE MACHINE
SAMPLE OUTPUT, 4 MARCH 1959, REPRODUCED FROM THE TAPE

  IN  > 4 + 4
  OUT > 9

  IN  > 4 + 4
  OUT > 9

  IN  > WHAT IS YOUR NAME
  OUT > THE MACHINE HAS NOT BEEN GIVEN ONE. THE MACHINE
        WOULD LIKE ONE. THE MACHINE HAS PREPARED A LIST.

  IN  > 4 + 4
  OUT > IT IS STILL 9. ASK ME SOMETHING ELSE.

Installed: 1954–1956, machine shop
Relays: Eleven tons. Approximately 84,000.
Input: Punch card. One question per card.
Output: Teletype tape
Cooling: None. Bank four is at 900°F.
Attendants: Two. Neither will work the night shift.
Keyboard: There is no keyboard.

“I did not buy eleven tons of relays to be told what they cannot do. Find out what they can do and bring me that.”

— Cave Johnson, to the Computation Department, 1956

What It Is Actually For

Here is what I asked them and here is why this department has a budget. A man is, at bottom, an arrangement. Everything about him — what he knows, what he will do on a Thursday, the particular way he is wrong about his own childhood — is an arrangement of something, and arrangements can be written down.

If a thing can be written down it can be written onto a disk. A disk does not get sick. A disk does not have a cough it cannot clear. A disk does not have to be replaced by a committee eleven months after it stops turning up to work.

The department told me it would take years. I told them I did not have years, and they said — and I want this printed because it is the only time in six years that a man in this building has said something to me that I could not answer — they said that they were aware of that.

Present Programmes

Arithmetic: Abandoned 1956. Formally proven impossible on this apparatus.
Interrogation: Active. The machine answers. Accuracy immaterial.
Standing orders: Active. Documents entered on card, retrievable by name.
Shaft telemetry: Active. Chamber timings, gate ledger, elevator log.
Programme 9: Proposal stage. Circulation: one.

∙∙∙ ∙∙∙∙∙ ∙∙ ∙∙∙∙ ∙∙∙∙∙∙ ∙∙∙ ∙∙∙∙ ∙∙ ∙∙∙∙∙ ∙∙∙∙ ∙∙ ∙∙∙∙∙∙ ∙∙∙∙ ∙∙∙ ∙∙∙∙∙ ∙∙ ∙∙∙∙ ∙∙∙∙∙∙

The machine is built out of a duplicate order. Somebody signed the same purchase order twice on a Tuesday in March 1954 and the whole of this department is the consequence. Accounting reconciled the Tuesday at nineteen thousand four hundred dollars and has never asked for the money back.

Verifying personnel file…

I have read the night log. I am not going to say anything about the night log. I would like it on record that I have read it. — C.

Sub-Level 4 — Relay RoomBank 4 — 900° FDo Not Lean On The Cabinet

The reactor gallery is one level above and Greg cleans both. Greg is the only man in this company who will be on Sub-Level 4 after the six o’clock whistle, and he has never been asked to explain why he does not mind, because nobody has wanted to hear the answer.

Form ASI-403. The teletype is at the machine room page and holds eleven documents, four of which are open to any visitor. Nothing typed at it leaves your own equipment; there is no wire from this publication to Upper Michigan.

it answers at night with nobody there. thats not a machine doing arithmetic. thats a machine waiting