An ingenious machine

This guy is Ibehem, a computer salesman from my favourite Iznogoud album, Iznogoud and the magic computer. I'm taking my first steps in learning Prolog, and I'm constantly spotting parallels with logic programming and the stories in this album. The second story, Road to Nowhere, combines traversing the graphs, spanning and pruning the trees and using taboos with a story that reminds me of one of my other favourite authors (besides Goscinny), Borges.

Anyway, in late 1960's people seemed to have less prejudices on what the computers are and how they should be used. I think the view that computer is supposed to give us answers instead of just being a passive piece of automation keeps on fascinating me. Ibehem's computer has an ultrasimplistic user intercafe (write your question on a piece of paper and slide it in) that would make Jakob Nielsen drool.

Besides, I found out the word for computer in French is ordinateur, which is one of the coolest expressions I know, only rivalled by Finnish tietokone, literally "knowledge machine". Prolog teaches that computers--oh, ordinateurs--should really be treated and used more as knowledge machines than computers.