Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:12 — 12.1MB) | Embed
We spend some time with the ships and subs of the American Civil war, take our hats off to George Boole, and watch the beginning of radio.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:27 — 13.7MB) | Embed
After the battery was invented, people began using electricity to do things like discover new elements and create new and better materials. Meanwhile, the punch card became a way to record information so that a machine could read and write it. Companies such as IBM were founded to keep track of it all. Wires stretched around the world to send messages fast enough to coordinate the new railroads, and new machines were invented to read and write faster than any human operators could manage.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:35 — 15.2MB) | Embed
From water wheels to steam engines, to the taming of electricity, join us for another instalment in our episodes about where computers came from.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:47 — 13.3MB) | Embed
We rewind slightly to cover the beginnings of automated logic. Then we have a look-see at the mechanical calculators of the 17th century, and the people who made it happen. Along the way, we find the birth of binary.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:23 — 17.3MB) | Embed
We’d planned to get a bit further, but there was just too much nifty history. Water wheels, paper mills, the fall of Rome, the golden age of Islam, and the spread of the number zero, more than enough for one episode.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:25 — 16.3MB) | Embed
If you want to come up with a machine that computes, (a computer,) you need numbers with which to compute. Before we had the numbers we know and love, several other numbering systems were tried. Today we take a look at some of them and how they worked, along with their historical context.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:41 — 15.3MB) | Embed
We decided to spend a few episodes telling the story of how we got computers. This episode, in typical “Lab With Brad” fashion, we’re going all the way back to the beginning of the story. And by “beginning,” we mean slightly before we were human beings.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:50 — 15.2MB) | Embed
The Permian period began with lush forests. new bugs arrived to feed on the succulent plants, strange sharks still swam the seas, and the first large plant eaters and their predators walked the increasingly dry earth. At the end of the period was the most devastating mass extinction in our planets history.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:16 — 13.8MB) | Embed
During the carboniferous, forests and swamp dominated the landscape. In the oceans, strange new sharks appeared. Giant insects walked amongst the trees while the first reptiles and early ancestors of what would become mammals hid inside rotted stumps.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:59 — 15.6MB) | Embed
Giant Mushrooms, the first forests, 28 foot long armored fish hunting sharks who were hunting smaller fish. In shallow streams and ponds, some fish were changing, becoming better at breathing air. They developed fins that could support their weight out of the water, if only for a little while at a time. By the end of the Devonian period, the fish that would become us crawled out of the water and went for a walk.
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