Timed to the publication of his new book, Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson is interviewed by Kevin Kelly in Wired. The opening:

“Wired: Because your father, Freeman Dyson, worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, you grew up around folks who were building one of the first computers. Was that cool?

George Dyson: The institute was a pretty boring place, full of theoreticians writing papers. But in a building far away from everyone else, some engineers were building a computer, one of the first to have a fully electronic random-access memory. For a kid in the 1950s, it was the most exciting thing around. I mean, they called it the MANIAC! The computer building was off-limits to children, but Julian Bigelow, the chief engineer, stored a lot of surplus electronic equipment in a barn, and I grew up playing there and taking things apart.

Wired: Did that experience influence how you thought about computers later?

Dyson: Yes. I tried to get as far away from them as possible.

Wired: Why?

Dyson: Computers were going to take over the world. So I left high school in the 1960s to live on the islands of British Columbia. I worked on boats and built a house 95 feet up in a Douglas fir tree. I wasn’t antitechnology; I loved chain saws and tools and diesel engines. But I wanted to keep my distance from computers.” (Thanks Browser.)