Machine Made is a short story written by J. T. McIntosh

J. T. McIntosh

J. T. McIntosh was a pseudonym used by Scottish writer and journalist James Murdoch MacGregor.-Biography:Born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, but living largely in Aberdeen, MacGregor used the McIntosh pseudonym as well as "H. J...

 and published first in the Summer 1951 issue of New Worlds

New Worlds (magazine)

New Worlds was a British science fiction magazine which was first published professionally in 1946. For 25 years it was widely considered the leading science fiction magazine in Britain, publishing 201 issues up to 1971...

magazine. In 1965 it had its copyright renewed, after which it was selected for inclusion in the April 1966 Giants Unleashed

Giants Unleashed

Giants Unleashed is an anthology of science fiction short stories compiled and edited, by Groff Conklin, and published simultaneously in the United States and Canada in 1965 by Grosset & Dunlap, Inc....

short story collection edited by Groff Conklin

Groff Conklin

Edward Groff Conklin was a leading science fiction anthologist. He edited 40 anthologies of science fiction, one of mystery stories , wrote books on home improvement and was a freelance writer on scientific subjects as well as a published poet...

. This collection of short stories was published again in 1967.

Plot

A young woman with a stunted intellect, being the victim of brain damage from birth, is hired on to perform basic menial labor (such as janitorial services) in a facility dedicated to the operation and programming of a mainframe computer. In her free time, she is curious whether the machine can add and subtract some basic numbers when she types them in. She has checked the results when she goes home, and sometimes spends days adding and subtracting the numbers to see if the results are correct. When she is at work, she has a long day walking alone through the thousands of square feet of the facility, checking on metal casings and consoles in this facility, and dusting them as needed. She knows that typing things into the computer is forbidden for non-scientists. Therefore she chooses her time well, and organizes her day so no one will know she is submitting questions to the computer. She sits down at a console when she knows there is nobody around, and the computer begins to recognize her style of typing. She hunts and pecks rather slowly. She has tried this four times before, and is surprised on the fifth time when the computer starts to talk to her by spooling out information in paper form.

Trivia

• There are references to memory bank
  Memory Bank
  A memory bank is a logical unit of storage in electronics, which is hardware dependent. In computer the memory bank may be determined by the memory access controller and the CPU along with physical organization of the hardware memory slots....
  
  s and the two basic laws of robotics: the computer must help all mankind first, and help individual humans second.

• This is an early instance in science fiction
  Science fiction
  Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
  
   literature where a computer
  Computer
  A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
  
   decides to teach someone how to fix or repair organic
  Organ (anatomy)
  In biology, an organ is a collection of tissues joined in structural unit to serve a common function. Usually there is a main tissue and sporadic tissues . The main tissue is the one that is unique for the specific organ. For example, main tissue in the heart is the myocardium, while sporadic are...
  
   brain injury
  Brain injury
  A brain injury is any injury occurring in the brain of a living organism. Brain injuries can be classified along several dimensions. Primary and secondary brain injury are ways to classify the injury processes that occur in brain injury, while focal and diffuse brain injury are ways to classify...
  
  .