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This site was chosen for a Look Smart Award in January 1997
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This site was chosen for a Look Smart Award in January 1997
The following "slides" outline the major topics of presentation in each of the episodes of the video series The Machine That Changed the World which was produced by WGBH Television in Boston MA, in cooperation with the British Broadcasting Corp., with support from ACM, NSF and UNISYS.
There is a book which accompanied the series that you may want to reference:
Palfreman, Jon, and Doron Swade. The Dream Machine: Exploring the Computer Age, BBC Books, London, 1991, 208 pp.
For more links to the history of computing pages click here.
and one who was missed from the video but who is very much involved in breaking the German Enigma Codes with Alan Turing and Donald Michie during the Second World War, and who was involved in the development of the Manchester Machine, is I. J. Good. Good is a faculty member in our Statistics department here at Virginia Tech! An excellent story on Jack also appeared in the Roanoke Times.
The ENIAC was 50 years old in 1996. The University of Pennsylvania put on a series of events during the year and established a WWW Home Page to keep you abreast of developments. It is intended that this page will also include a simulation of the ENIAC.
The Growing Market for Computers
The First
Computer Company
Bureau of the Census Machine
UNIVAC -- A magazine advertisment
of the time,
courtesy Unisys & GTE Sylvania, through WGBH Press
Kit.
Magnetic Tape
Lyons Electronic Office- LEO
John Pinkerton
Commercial Applications
Cambridge
University- EDSAC
McCarthyism - Impact on Mauchly
Henry
Strauss
Remington Rand
1952
Presidential Election
IBM Enters the field
SSEC - Selective Sequence
Electronic Computer
The First Drum Machine- IBM 650
Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs
Programming Languages- Errors
FORTRAN, COBOL
Process
Control and Automation
Bank of America -
ERMA
Magnetic Ink Character
Recognition - MICR
The Transistor
Brattain,
Bardeen, Shockley (this link appears to have disappeared, we are looking for
a good replacement)
Integrated Circuit- Kilby & Noyce
Computers
and Space
Episode II of "The Machine That Changed the World"" had the opportunity to give credit for the 'invention' of the computer to one John Vincent Atanasoff. Atanasoff, together with a graduate student, Clifford Berry, developed a special purpose computer in the late 1930's that contained many of the elements of the modern computer. However, the development of the machine was hampered by the outset of World War II, and both Atanasoff and Berry moved to other work. In a later court case between Honeywell and Sperry Rand, the judge found the orininal patent claims by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to be invalid, stating that the inventor of the computer was "One, John Vincent Atanasoff".
Another missing person is Grace Murray Hopper. Dr. Hopper was perhaps the first modern woman to be involved in computers (Ada King, Countess of Lovelace possibly being the first in the 19th century). She started work for Howard Aiken in 1943 on the Harvard Mark I Calculator (also called the IBM ASCC). Sunsequently she became deeply involved in the development of high level languages for computers, creating the concept of a compiler, and two early languages. She was highly influential in the development of COBOL and its usage in military installations. She became the highest ranking female Navy person of her time (Rear Admiral) and a role model to thousands of young women. She is perhaps best known for her discovery of the first computer bug in the Harvard Mark II computer. The bug now resides at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.
Books in a Library
Commentary by Mitch Kapor and Robert Taylor.
Sketchpad - Ivan
Sutherland
Commentary by Ted Nelson (son of Ozzie and Harriett)
Doug
Engelbart - The
Mouse. Engelbart also produced an extremely foresighted paper on "AUGMENTING
HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework" published on 1962. It is a classic
that should be on the reading list for all computer science majors. This paper
is on-line courtesy of students at the Technical University Aachen,
Germany.
Xerox PARC- Alan Kay (a biography by
Scott Gasch)
Children - Jean Piaget
Games- Illusions
The Alto
Computer
Chips - Microprocessors
Ted Hoff
Altair
8800
Homebrew
Computer Club
Steve
Jobs and Steve Wozniak, photograph courtesy of the Apple Computer Company,
through the WGBH new release on this video. See also "The Triumph of the
Nerds" and a biography of Steven Wozniak by Manish
Srivastava.
Blue Boxes - Personal Computers
Lee Felsenstein - IBM
5100
IBM PC - 1981
Macintosh - 1984
Macintosh computer
interface
Environments
Users
The first spreadsheet by Dan Bricklin Lotus
1,2,3 - Mitch
Kapor
Microsoft
- Bill Gates (an early history by John
Mirick and a biography by
Stacey Reitz.)
Sesame
Street
Handicapped -
Assistive Technology; an article by Christopher R. Murphy (CS 3604, Spring 1997)
Chained
computers
New Projections
Illusions
Virtual Reality: (Two articles by
Scott Tate and Keith Mitchell, CS 3604, Fall 1996.)
Henry Fuchs - UNC
Fred
Brooks, Jr.
Late 1950s - Marvin
Minsky and John McCarthy
set up an A.I. Dept. at MIT.
1960 - Slagel's program for freshman calculus;
from "number crunching" to intelligent problem solving.
Mind vs. Brain
approach; mind = software, brain = hardware. (The notion that a thinking
computer need not be modeled on the actual biology of the brain is in
vogue.)
Block stacking program - lack of "common sense."
1970 - Edinburgh
University, "Freddie" image recognition application.
1970s - Stanford Kart;
motion planning. (Huge computational resources and time required to navigate
through a room which a four year old child can do in real time.)
Joseph
Weizenbaum's ELIZA.
Russian
to English language translator - earliest of the non-numerical applications.
(Hype not lived up to.)
Underestimation of the difficulty of A.I. (Tasks
difficult for humans are found easy for computers and vice versa. Computers lack
background knowledge.)
Future of A.I. looks bleak - Dreyfus' "What Computers
Can't Do."
Terry
Winograd's SHRDLU - intelligence within microworlds.
Expert Systems -
Feigenbaum's DENDRAL. (Deep but
very narrow areas of specialisation. Expert systems found to be
"brittle.")
"Idiot savants."
Early 1970s - story understanding via scripts
and frames. (Minsky.)
Modeling commonsense. (Children possess broad and
shallow knowledge. People learn by extending the fringe of what they already
know, therefore computers make bad pupils as they lack "basic
knowledge.")
1984 - Lenat's ten-year CYC
project to catalogue "commonsense." (Create an encyclopedia of commonsense
basic knowledge.)
A new look at modeling intelligence by modeling the
biological brain.
1950s and 1960s - Perceptrons.
(an article by Michele Estebon, CS
3604, 1997).
Late 1970s - Neural networks;
Connectionists.
Self-driven vehicle - "trained" to drive.
Selective
training - tank recognition failure.
NetTalk.
Large networks require large
training times.
Brain - a collection of special purpose machines -->
general intelligence/ commonsense.
A.I. - history of fascinating
failures.
A good source of computer trivia is the Annual ACM/Computer Museum Computer Bowl. The questions and answers to several year's questions have been published in the Communications of the ACM. The 1994 set were included in the August 1994 issue of ACMemberNet.
From the Publicity Release Package of WGBH.
There is no web site or e-mail address available as of 96/10/02.
