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W Daniel Hillis – Stuck on a rock slide (32/248)

268 views · Published 4 September 2017 · 2:07 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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To listen to more of W Daniel Hillis’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzo005LM6PTERy4uxq92sWe

Born in 1956, US inventor, scientist, engineer and visionary W Daniel Hillis pioneered the concept of parallel computers and co-founded Thinking Machines and Applied Minds, which marked a new era in computing and established Hillis as a computing legend. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes and George Dyson; date recorded: 2016]

TRANSCRIPT: So then eventually after a few days... Of course we had no way of contacting the people at either end, so my parents knew there had been a hartal, they knew that we probably hadn't made it to Darjeeling. The people in Darjeeling knew that we hadn't shown up, they probably didn't know about the hartal. So we just disappeared for a few days but that was kind of normal in India. So eventually they... The hartal got over and the train started running again and we showed up in Darjeeling and went to the tea estate. And then had a wonderful time hiking around the tea estate where there were also tigers, and we really wanted to see a tiger. So we would go hiking.

And at one point we got on a hike that was sort of too long and we were worried it was getting dark. And... But we could see the tea estate. And so we decided to take a shortcut just to go straight toward it which was a big mistake. And it got steeper and steeper on the hills. And eventually it got so that we couldn't... You know, we let ourselves down, we couldn't go backwards, so we had to keep going. And eventually we got to this area of rock slide and when we tried to go across them the rocks started sliding.

So we got in the middle of a rock slide and whenever we moved the rocks would slide. And fortunately somebody saw us and we were really stuck. But they... A whole bunch of people came and they made this kind of human chain and they went and they very, very carefully walked across the rock slide, it would slide a little bit, and they got us and they pulled us off of it like, you know, people as the rocks slid away. So that was actually the closest we probably came to getting killed on that trip. And so we went back with a lot of exciting stories.

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