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Vacuum tubes were all well and good, but they were bulky, hot, power hungry, and prone to failure. Early on, artificial neural networks showed promise, as even if tubes broke while it was running, it would keep working. Meanwhile, the transistor is invented, and the unreliable tubes slowly became obsolete.
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We spend some more time with some more vintage tech. This time we look at audio recorded on spools of wire, teletype equipment for input and output, and the magnetic core. Check out the links below to catch some nifty videos of this stuff being demonstrated and explained.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:33 — 11.9MB) | Embed
Before microchips, before solid state transistors, early electronic computers had to hold information somewhere… somehow… Join us as we look at some old methods of storing electronic memory.
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We started with the stone age, back in episode 270. Today, we finally get to look at an all electronic, Turing complete, programmable computer. We also take a short side trip to more or less fail to explain what “Turing complete” means.
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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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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:37 — 12.0MB) | Embed
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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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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