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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