So I hope you enjoyed that.
Again I tried to showcase the, the
juxtaposition of the mechanical computers
moving to the electronic computers and how
it was a collective effort by, by many
people.
And so one of the things that happened
sort of after this.
After the war, they didn't need Bletchley
Park anymore, so they shut the Bletchley
Park down.
And all these people who had worked on all
these things and built all these things
went to various academic places like MIT,
Manchester, Harvard.
And what happened was, what they had done
was a secret and they could say nothing
about it.
But they had realized, and they couldn't
forget that electronics could do
computation, and electronics could do
computation far more rapidly than anything
we've ever imagined before.
So a series of computers came up really
fast after the war.
They got you know relaxed the wars over,
we feel good.
But let's start thinking about what we
would build if we were going to do
computations like weather, or other kinds
of cool computations instead of just
wartime computations.
And, and so these next generation of
computers that are often thought of as the
first computers in the world, which are
really kind of like the follow-on
computers to the computers built at
Bletchley Park.
And so the immediate postwar period in the
1940s, took the US and UK code breaking.
There was similar things in the United
States as well, and I'm sure elsewhere,
where that pushed the envelope of
computation.
But folks that had built all these things
for wartime purposes switched and moved
into academic and peacetime purposes.
And so they built I mean, if you think
about it, they have less pressure but they
already know it's feasible and they can
kind of sit back and relax and go like ok,
that would be a little better.
We kind of compromise there, so they built
some really elegant computers.
And you know, they can all sort of fight
over who's the first.
But ultimately, they all pretty much came
out very quickly, one after another, cause
the idea had escaped.
So this is the beginning of sort of
electronic computation.
The fact that electricity can be used to
represent data, and that can be used to
change data very rapidly as compared to
other things that used physical.
Storage for computer information so this
was a great time.
Electronic computation from the
specialized to the general purpose and
these people really built some exciting
computers many of the architectures of
which are, are, are kind of still sort of
with us.
A lot of the architectures were
innovative, the innovative architectures
we still use today were conceived and
imagined there.
Also in the post war period in 1950s, as a
bit of an aside there was a, there was a
realization by the, certainly the federal
government United States that academics
were kind of useful.
Right, I mean the people that really had
won the war for them were academics.
Not just computer people but also people
that built, designed airplanes and radar
and things like that.
And so there's a sense that the safest
country was the country that had the
smartest people.
And in many ways, the entire US
educational system was built to find
really bright scientists and educated them
very effectively.
And so and so there was a real boom in
building science departments national
science foundation was fund created right
after the war.
And, and so United States and other
governments really greatly invested in
research.
And there's this movie Beautiful Mind and
I've got the URL there at the bottom.
It's not required, but I love the movie.
And it gives you a sense in particular the
scene I'm pointing to, gives you a sense
of how mathematicians were in many ways
treated like celebrities.
So I will pause just for a minute, in case
you want to pause this video and then go
take a look at the John Nash video.
So of course John Nash was a real person
he received his PhD in mathematics at
Princeton.
At 22 years old he was a prodigy.
He was on the mathematics faculty at MIT
in 1951 to 1958, and he had adult onset
schizophrenia.
Right before he was 30 years old and, and
it was quite a severe case.
And it took it, it, it, he spent a number
of years in sort of mental institutions,
homeless, Et cetera.
But in his work in Princeton in an area
called of economics called, game theory.
He did something that was quite
innovative, and it really revolutional,
revolutionized in many ways our
understanding of economics.
And, and he sort of he, he got his
schizophrenia under control in the mid
90s.
And, and he was awarded the Noble Prize
for economics in 1994.
So this is just kind of this moment where
this stuff, all this stuff was blossoming
in the 40's and the 50's.
Now in the 1960's, we started seeing a
different way of computing.
This was moving from the research into the
mathematics of building computers to the
applications of the computers.
And we needed to have connectivity because
you would be a computer and.
You know in, in 1955 there might be one
computer available to a university
researchers in the entire state, and so
you had to connect them together, and so
we would often end up with, these things
we called terminals in our office and they
would use these dial up modems and they
would connect.
Perhaps for a local call to a local
computer, or even a long distance call, a
very expensive long distance to a remote
computer.
But these computers were so central and so
precious, that we didn't care about the
cost of phones and we couldn't share them.
I mean we didn't, everybody didn't' have a
computer they way they do today.
So there was a couple of different models.
One is that you had people doing their
work connecting to computers over these
modems.
And then more rarely, you had computer to
computer connections using what are called
leased lines.
These leased lines were very expensive.
They were kind of like making a long
distance phone call 24 hours a day, 7 days
a week.
They were rarely used in academic
situations because they were so expensive.
It was more common for a bank to use them
to, say, move all their data from their
branch locations to the central locations.
Once a day they were generally slow, and
very expensive, and they were justifiable
in certain situations.
And so, that's kind of how our world was,
we, we had something on our desk, and then
we used that to connect through the phone
lines to a central computer that was
shared with many different people, we
called it time share, and so, oops.
So this next video that I want to show you
just the first part of it, you don't have
to watch the whole thing.
Is kind of in the 60s in, and the, and 70s
when I became involved in computing, this
was kind of the way that we perceived our
computers.
You know, we would dial them up.
And they made these clunking noises those
teletype that you're going to see in this
video is a, is a world war two artifact
basically.
And, and my first programming personally
was on this kind of a computer, making
this exact noise.
Noise that your going to hear in this
video.
And I think that the key to emphasize here
is that you know, your it's kind of fun to
look at back at this guy with his horny
rimmed glasses.
But, but we really were enjoying
ourselves, and you think, well I got this
fancy cell phone and it does all these
wonderful things, and I play Angry Birds
on it, and, and weren't these people not
having fun?
And the answer is we were having a great
time.
We were connecting, communicating,
calculating, computing, doing all these
wonderful things.
We just were doing it more slowly with
simpler equipment.
But, but even from the beginning in the
sixties and the seventies, people talking
to people were an important part in the
use of this technology.
So take a quick look at this video and
then come on back.