At the beginning of July 1975 I left Rome with my wife and my three children, respectively 4 years, 2 years and 8 months old. Destination Ithaca. The house had been lent to us by a colleague of the Computer Science Department of Cornell University and was on the outskirts of Ithaca, uphill. In Upson Hall (the old building of the CS Department) I was sharing the office with Bernd Reusch, a very friendly and humorous colleague from Dortmund who was doing research on switching theory and linear automata, a particular kind of finite state automata.