Computers: A History
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- čas přidán 15. 03. 2021
- Even the most humdrum of electrical devices nowadays contains at least one computer; yet surprisingly few people are aware of their history, their form or function.
In this talk we will see that not only is the history of computers rich and diverse, their architecture likewise. Astonishingly, all the computers ever made can be modelled by one universal machine - the Turing machine.
A lecture by Richard Harvey
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
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I remember when I was at school, I was a very quiet shy person who basically hid away. We had to do a lecture on any subject we wanted, to last around 15mins. I chose to do a history of computers and they couldn't shut me up. In the end with all the questions and interest from everyone it lasted about an hour, the length of the class. This was back in the late 80's .
It just dawned on me how much I have lived on the forefront of the digital revolution...all the way from a Commodore 64 and visicalc and early Steingberg pro 16 music software, to where we are now.
Interesting lecture ...it sure reminded me of many things I had long forgotten :)
I remember back in my third year of college (1986), I took an introductory course in programming and used those cards that I had to put into a main frame. Quickly I knew programming was not for me.
The fax patent shown in the talk reminded me that the earliest fax machine was patented in 1843 - before the telephone had been invented. If it had been of high enough quality I wonder if people would have prefered to write, then fax, letters to each other rather than speaking on the phone. A bit like text messaging instead of video calling.
Interesting. I hope I selected the patent that was the first use of PCM - ie the first digital fax machine. But that word "first" is so troublesome in technology...there is much lobbying for inventors from particular countries to be first. And often national or commercial security obscures the first. And in terms of what is succesful it is often, as I said in the lecture, the second mouse which gets the cheese!
Very cool. Thanks. BTW there is a typo, it's Gnutella not guntella :)
I was a bit surprised by the claim that Forethought (Powerpoint) was the _first_ acquisition, by Microsoft, in 1987. It is well known that already in 1981 Microsoft bought the operating system 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, which they then rebranded as MS-DOS. It took some careful replaying of what you said to understand that Forethought was the first _company_ that was fully swallowed by Microsoft, as opposed to the acquisition of just software.
I formatted my enitre final year thesis in LaTeX, a lot easier to use than Word back then, such fun times... :D
Watson could be excused his limited market view. The number of people who could afford the enormous price of a computer at the time, and had the problems that would justify it was quite limited. (Governments and similar-sized entities.)
The Weizac generated Nobel Prizes when it was the first and only computer in Israel.
Claude Shannon's wife Betty, a mathematician, was important to his work.
The LEO trip to see ENIAC was a cover story. One of Lyon's people had learnt the value of data processing working at Bletchley Park during WWII, but couldn't reveal it.
DEC's decline could be explained by the work of its Sales Prevention Department, as it was generally known.
I wonder how much early wordprocessing was based on things like the flexowriter. You could type a document which appeared on the paper but also on paper tape. Editing functions could change the tape so that you could print a clean, modified, version of the paper document. You could even do mailmerge where zones in the master document (running the tape in a loop) were replaced by data from another tape (the address list). I used one in my first job in 1974 to send covering letters with printed reports. The reports included results from programs run from punched cards but that's another story.
Looks like he’s making his presentation from a shower stall or public bathroom. Lol!
A friend of mine described it as "Scandinavian prison" so I'll gratefully acknowledge that!
@@richardharvey8354 I enjoyed your presentation. Thank you. p.s. hope you get out of the prison soon. 😂
Pub toilets !!!!🤣👍
Typical American, all their inventions are from European Immigrants
17:10 Grace Hopper looks like the type who stayed up all night playing Tour of Duty while snorting poppers and blasting Daft Punk...
Where are the previous lectures mentioned in this video?
Excellent presentation, thank you 👍
Superb lecture. Really enjoyed it.
Konrad Zuse built a computer that followed a list of binary instructions -- in 1941. The program and data storage were separate, and it didn't have conditional branching, but it did have loops.
so it's not technically a "turing complete" computer
@@stachowi It takes surprisingly little to be Turing complete. A computer with the single instruction "subtract and branch if negative" can compute anything, for example. Or, if you don't mind wasting memory on large tables and having self-modifying code, the single instruction "move byte and jump" does the job. Depending on what resources the Z1 (1938) had for addressing memory it could emulate one of these two. The Z3 (1941) was proven to be Turing complete in 1998.
Love to learn to use the abacus 🧮
How can you possibly claim to be a history without mentioning Colossus , Tommy Flowers , the Dollis Hill GPO research station, the National Computing Centre and of course Turing?
Well I did mention Turing but this is a very interesting criticism. The Brits are very proud of the Bletchley Park activity partly because it shortened the war. I agree with that. But ... the activity was not revealed until around 1974. There is a fascinating account of Brian Randell revealing Collosus at a Palo Alto conference on Computer History. People were flabbergasted. Zuse was open-mouthed. In other words the secrets of Bletchley had been kept secret. Thus none of the technology developed at Bletchley had any input into any computing before 1974 and by then it was obsolete. So my judgement was it was safe to leave it out because, like hydraulic computers; mechanical calculators; the Harwell Dekatron and many many others missed out, they are peripheral to the story of computers today. But, if you are saying that Bletchley Park makes an interesting lecture in its own right then I agree with you - there is more than enough material for an hour and CZcams has masses of examples. There is even a whole feature film and several books on it. The National Computing Centre was founded in 1966 by the Wilson government in the UK and went bust around 30 years later. The Archives of IT and Wikipedia are rather silent on its achievements but it would be nice to know more.
Nothing about Konrad Suze?
You mean Zuse. Not to minimize what he did, but the development of computers in the UK and US didn’t depend on his work.
Not to mention loading a slide tray...the old ones, you might put a slide or two in backwards...😁
Yes. A total pain. For a while I hankered after the superb resolution of 35mm slides but with 4k projectors now commonplace the slide projector, and OHP, are now relics.
38:58 Perhaps because Apple's early computers had such noisy fans that they now have such an aversion to them and have been desperately innovating all sorts of cooling solutions in order to get rid of any fans from their products. That noise must've been so triggering to Steve Jobs.
Apple IIs actually did not have fans. Whatever the noise is that the presenter is referring to must've been a third party add-on to the system or something else in the scene not related to the Apple at all.
$18,000 monthly rental on 1953 was indeed a princely sum not to be scoffed at. Over $175,000 in today’s currency, over $2,000,000 per year. Not bad rental income for a lowly 701 IBM computer.
Does he ever flush?