The Scientist Staff | May 29, 1988 | 6 min read
BY BRUCE G. BUCHANAN Knowledge Systems Laboratory Stanford University Palo Alto, Calif. " History keeps us honest. Consider, for example, Charles Babbage. Babbage was a genius who anticipated many design features of modem computers, but his ideas had to be reinvented many decades after his death in 1870. A.G. Bromley, "The evolution of Babbage’s computing engines," Annals of the History of Computing, 9 (2), 113-36, 1987. " When organizations introduce electronic mail systems, they oft