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About this video

By George Dyson

THE BIRTH OF THE COMPUTER

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5 Discuss:

a) What other inventions in the history of computer sciences do you know?

b) Who designed the first computing device in your country?

c) Who is the greatest programmer in your country?

A member of the fabulous Dyson clan, George Dyson is sometimes defined as a son-of and a brother-of, but he has found his own voice as a chronicler and a philosopher of science and the future. The son of physicist Freeman Dyson, George grew up inside one of the most fervid hotbeds of scientific research in the Atomic Age.

For additional information about the presenter go to

http://www.ted.com/speakers/george_dyson.html

A historian and philosopher of science, George Dyson takes a clear-eyed and deeply researched view of our recent scientific past -- while showing where it may lead us.

1 Translate into Russian:

Artificial thinking, artificial logic, drop the marbles down the track, shift the gate, put together, brainless, finite state machine, predict, cellular, chunk, catch, qubit, start the program up, exhaustive detail, give credit to, geek, get in trouble, sloppy, cathode, bunch, archive, behold, rapport, suspended animation, proteomics, synthesize.

2 Find the second word of the compound and translate:

Watch the video “The birth of the computer”

http://www.ted.com/talks/george_dyson_at_the_birth_of_the_computer.html

While watching:

Fill in the gaps:

a) The first person to really explain that was Thomas Hobbes, who, in ______, explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing, and if you want to do ______ thinking and ______ logic, you can do it all with arithmetic.

b) Leibniz, who came a little bit later -- this is ______ -- showed that you didn't even need ______. You could do the whole thing with ______. Here, we have all the ______ arithmetic and logic that drove the computer revolution.

c) He talked about doing it with ______, having ______ and what we now call ______ registers, where you ______ the gates, drop the ______ down the tracks.

d) So June 1945 -- actually, the bomb hasn't even been dropped yet -- and Von Neumann is ______ ______ all the theory to actually build this thing, which also goes back to Turing, who, before that, gave the idea that you could do all this with a very brainless, little, ______ state machine, just reading a tape in and reading a tape out.

e) And that's really the simplest computer. It's basically why you need the ______, because it only has two ideas.

f) These were not theoretical physicists. They were real ______ type guys, and they actually built this thing. … They were using vacuum tubes, very narrow, ______ techniques to get actually ______ behavior out of these radio vacuum tubes.

g) The memory was in ______ ray tubes -- a whole ______ of spots on the face of the tube -- very, very sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances.

h) This is modifying IBM equipment, which is the origins of the whole ______-______ industry, later at IBM.

i) "Something's wrong with the air conditioner -- smell of burning V-belts in the air." "A short -- do not turn the machine on." "IBM machine putting a ______-______ substance on the cards. The ______ is from the roof."

j) Barricelli, he came to do what we now call, really, artificial life, trying to see if, in this artificial universe -- he was a ______-______, way, way, way ahead of his time.

k) This was published after he died: his sort of unfinished notes on ______-______ machines, what it takes to get the machines sort of jump-started to where they begin to reproduce.

After watching:

1 Match the words in A with the words in B:

2 Answer the questions:

a) What did Thomas Hobbes explain in 1651?

b) What did Leibniz show in 1679?

c) Who was the first person to really talk about building a computing machine? What was the principle of its work?

d) Who reinvented such a machine? When?

e) What are the essentials of the modern computer?

f) Why did Von Neumann and his group move to Princeton?

g) Who wrote the Theory of Games?

h) Who built the bomb?

i) What tools did Princeton programmers use to build the machine?

j) What was the memory of the computer? What were the input and output?

k) How many vacuum tubes did they use?

l) In what conditions did they work at Princeton? Give examples from the talk. What kind of people were they?

m) When was the machine shut down? Who was running it until midnight when the machine was officially turned off? What did he do in the project?

3 Decide if the statements are true or false:

a) The decimal arithmetic and logic drove the computer revolution.

b) Turing gave the idea of a finite state machine reading a tape in and reading a tape out.

c) Leibniz and Von Neumann used electrons to build a computer.

d) The RCA’s office made a decision that televisions are the future, not computers.

e) There was a very small group of programmers working with Von Neumann at Princeton.

f) This group was hackers who stole sugar in Princeton.

g) The first machine was cloned at 15 other places around the world.

h) At Princeton they had a mouse in 1953.

i) Barricelli came to do what we now call artificial life.