A “going-on”; yes, anastasis is the word for research a virus has defied,
and for the virologist
with variables still untried—
too impassioned to desist.
—Marianne Moore, The Staff of Aesculapius

Why does one compute? The question might appear to have many answers. In 1857 Charles Babbage, the draftsman of the Analytical Engine, gives us a lexical response: the machine will take up the “menial,” mensurative, quantitative work of the brain, as opposed to the qualitative ones. In the documents of the Ford Foundation’s landmark urban planning exercise forCalcuttacarriedoutbetween1961and1974, Edward Echeverria, Ford’s head in Delhi, outlines a peculiar collaborative potential of the computer particularly germane to preempt the political challenges faced by a First World group of “experts” operating in the Third World. In Echeverria’s letter to Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis he argues that the computer has the ability to anticipate the babble of tongues erupting from the ground that may otherwise overwhelm the determinate language of the urban planner:

In planning activities, systematic co-operative use of such devices as the new graphic data processing equipment could be a powerful force working for the coherence of related efforts. Conversely, non-cooperative use of even identical equipment in very similar activities can lead to a confused situation characterized by technical rivalry, linguistic incompatibility, redundancy of information and of information processing, and practical inaccessibility of bought and paid-for information. The introduction of new information processing equipment always provokes the development of a using [sic] technology. In the case of graphic data processing equipment, which I believe will play a major role in planning activities at all levels. [sic] I hope that a cooperative development using technology should begin before arrival of the equipment spurs an immediate wild growth of techniques that defies control ... 1 At this point I would like you to know of our problems with a gravity model that we propose to use in projecting urban travel patterns, 25 years in the future ... This is done on an IBM 650 computor [sic]. We would like to know at this time whether your computer is radically different from this, as we would not like to change drastically the program that has been prepared by [us].