Written in the earliest days of automatic switching systems when few electronic computers existed, Meszar's paper raised the question of whether certain aspects of human thought are computable and others are not. Meszar argued for “the necessity of divorcing certain mental operations from the concept of thinking,” in order to “pave the way for ready acceptance of the viewpoint that automatic systems can accomplish many of the functions of the human brain.” Meszar was a director of switching systems at Bell Laboratories