In Gabriel García Márquez's literary classic,
One Hundred Years of Solitude,the fictional town of
Macondo is hit by a deadly insomnia plague that causes its denizens
to lose their memory. They forget names, notions – even the
identities of people and the awareness of their own being. To
counter the memory loss, they mark animals, plants and objects with
their respective names. But they would soon forget their intended
use, so they hang descriptive signs like this: "This is
the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce
milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee
to make coffee and milk." When that too fails, the
founder and patriarch of Macondo, José Arcadio
Buendía, builds a "memory machine" – a
primitive computer, if you will – that has 14,000 manual
entries.
