The Machine that Changed the World (1992) BBC

Episode III - The Paperback Computer

Episode III - The Paperback Computer

Books in a Library

Commentary by Mitch Kapor and Robert Taylor.

Sketchpad - Ivan Sutherland

Commentary by Ted Nelson (son of Ozzie and Harriett)

Doug Engelbart - The Mouse. Engelbart also produced an extremely foresighted paper on "AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework" published on 1962. It is a classic that should be on the reading list for all computer science majors. This paper is on-line courtesy of students at the Technical University Aachen, Germany.



Xerox PARC- Alan Kay (a biography by Scott Gasch)

Children - Jean Piaget

Games- Illusions

The Alto Computer

Chips - Microprocessors

Ted Hoff

Altair 8800

Homebrew Computer Club

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, photograph courtesy of the Apple Computer Company, through the WGBH new release on this video. See also "The Triumph of the Nerds" and a biography of Steven Wozniak by Manish Srivastava.

Blue Boxes - Personal Computers

Lee Felsenstein - IBM 5100

IBM PC - 1981

Macintosh - 1984

Macintosh computer interface

Environments

Users

The first spreadsheet by Dan Bricklin Lotus 1,2,3 - Mitch Kapor

Microsoft - Bill Gates (an early history by John Mirick and a biography by Stacey Reitz.)

Sesame Street

Handicapped - Assistive Technology; an article by Christopher R. Murphy (CS 3604, Spring 1997)

Chained computers

New Projections

Illusions

Virtual Reality: (Two articles by Scott Tate and Keith Mitchell, CS 3604, Fall 1996.)

Henry Fuchs - UNC

Fred Brooks, Jr.

The Machine that Changed the World (1992)

The Machine that Changed the World (1992) is a 5-episode television series on the history of electronic digital computers. It was written and directed by Nancy Linde, and produced by WGBH Television of Boston, Massachusetts, and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Backers included the Association for Computing Machinery, the National Science Foundation, and the UNISYS Corporation.

The first three episodes deal with the history of fully electronic general-purpose digital computers from the ENIAC through desktop microcomputers. The pre-history of such machines is examined in the first episode ("Giant Brains"), and includes a discussion of the contributions of Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, and others. The fourth episode ("The Thinking Machine") explores the topic of artificial intelligence. The fifth episode ("The World at Your FIngertips") explores the then-newly-emerging worldwide networking of computers. All episodes begin and end with a song by Peter Howell, "Stellae matutinae radius exoritur" ("The morning star's ray arises").

EPISODES:
   Episode 1, "Giant Brains" at waxy.org alternate link
   Episode 2, "Inventing the Future", at waxy.org alternate link
   Episode 3, "The Paperback Computer", at waxy.org alternate link
   Episode 4, "The Thinking Machine", at waxy.org alternate link
   Episode 5, "The World at Your Fingertips", at waxy.org alternate link