As suggested by the title of his essay, “Transcending Engineering Practice — NOR on the Path from Transistor Technology to Universal Indeterminacy,” to Albrecht Fritzsche, the NOR typescript is the work of not only an engineer, but also a philosopher-mathematician, and an artist.
Albrecht introduces the readers to the state of transistor technology in the 1950s and early 1960s before he shows how Spencer Brown’s invention and use of the cross in the NOR typescript already anticipates the later expansion of the embryonal Laws of Form beyond the concrete context of circuit design. Thus, the typescript also foreshadows the digital transformation of a society, in which programmers can code software without any deeper knowledge of the underlying hardware systems.
Albrecht concludes that the typescript constitutes more than an act of electrical engineering theory development. With the cross, everything “moves from the vertical to the horizontal. In the term itself, one argument is simply put behind another; nothing else matters.” In this sense, the typescript is the early work of an artist who entered philosophy into a Turing machine, and thus empowered both our love to wisdom and the machine.
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Design with the NOR, Ch. 1, Editorial Note