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On this day in 1944 the early computer Harvard Mark-1 was completed.

Built by IBM, it was a room-sized calculator. The machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronised thousands of component parts. We can’t turn the clock back and ignore new technology, as the 19th century Luddites tried to do by destroying machinery in the Victorian mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Learning to accept change is difficult but we have to adapt ourselves. Life, after all, is a continuous process of change that never stops and continues after we die.

Thomas Hardy said so in his poem Transformations:

Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.
These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.
So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

Today I ask: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference