It's amazing how manual this process still was in the late 70s. Imagine spending hours and hours pouring over tables of numbers. At the same time, it's amazing how hard it still is for computers to say "that's interesting". Sometimes it takes human to go "wow"
That's because "interestingness" takes a _lot_ of context.
Humans interpret the low dimensional natural world into much higher dimensional space by turning things into models (cars, cats, science, etc), and often "wow" comes from a combination of many of those high level interpretations.
