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War grips the globe, twice. Technology pushes forward, including the specialized calculating machines to encrypt messages on the one hand, and break the encryption of the enemy on the other.
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We talk about vacuum tubes, how they work and how they made radio and telephone work so much better. We also spend some time talking about the very first computer programmer, the mother of steam punk, and enchantress of number—Ada Lovelace.
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It took a little over two years, what with the one episode a week format and all, but this is Phil’s one-hundredth time as our co-host extraordinaire! We share some of the things that we couldn’t squeeze into previous episodes, become baffled by Benford’s law, and otherwise relax and shoot the breeze.
Take that, you filthy air currents!
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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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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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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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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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