Di and I had dessert with Susan and Jay Forrester Saturday evening. We talked about trips we'd taken, about his youth in the Nebraska sand hills, and generally chatted. I didn't know we'd been talking to a pioneer of computing and system dynamics until after Jay and Susan had said good-night; one of our companions, who knew I was in computers, clued me in.
He reminded me of my father-in-law, Jim Haggard, whose father had also grown up on a ranch and left the prarie life behind. In grandfather Haggard's case, that was to go to San Fransisco to work in the Union Pacific railroad's accounting department; Jay came to M.I.T., as he recounts in this memoir [PDF].
It's remarkable to recall, as Jay does in his memoir, that the capabilities of those early systems grew by measures that are much, much greater than what we see today. And those of us on the software side of the house have yet to catch up to those leaps and bounds.
But what I mostly recall is how friendly and unassuming Jay is. I'll have to start reading his books!
