hey guys it's been a while I know Adam Savage here test it calm and it's
been a while because I've been in heavy production on a brand new show for the
Science Channel which I can now finally tell you is called savage builds eight
episodes everything we build is totally absurd most of it works some of my
collaborators were incredible but that's not what I'm here to talk about I am
here to apologize that I haven't produced any new content for tested
since January but that's because the new show was taking all of my energy but
we're wrapped now so I'm coming back I'm gonna ease into making more videos for
tested slowly with a little bit of a show-and-tell
you will get a one day build soon I promise alright so show and tell
computer technology that's what I want to talk about today I've covered on the
site before how much I love the kurta mechanical computer often called the
pepper grinder 600 custom machine parts in here to be able to do addition
subtraction multiplication and division to an incredible amount of places this
actually has more computing power in this than a calculator however the
lightness and ease of the digital calculator killed curta as a company and
as a computer but computing technology history of computing the idea of binary
these are I think still to a lot of people abstract concepts and they were
made concrete for me by reading an amazing book called the soul of a new
machine by Tracy Kidder it walks you through the development of an early
desktop computer and it was the first time I understood that when you hear
binary you need to think a switch a switch with two states on or off or zero
and one since our number system can be converted to binary you can get a lot
more computing power out of this by making these switches smaller and
smaller a single switch is called a bit it is a thing that holds the information
of whether or not it's in a 0 or 1 state and this is one of the earliest bits
this is an IBM vacuum tube bit from the mid 50s
as you can see it's got a little plug at the bottom so it could plug into the
computer and man it would take a lot of use to
actually do any useful computing and especially if you computer had
difficulty to repair the memory you had to go one bit at a time
oh IBM was very proud of this technology they released magazine ads at the time
showing this incredible new miniaturization of the logic gate but a
few years later they actually figured out a way that gang-up eight of these
and make this this is a bite from a 1957 series 703 IBM computer you can see that
the vacuum tubes say IBM and the innovation of this over this is that you
could repair your memory one bite at a time eight times faster
there was this key you put into here that locked this little cam lock and
installed your memory into the computer now they didn't always gang up things in
bytes they also used half bytes what were
actually called nibbles and I found that out when Bob Metcalfe the inventor of
Ethernet was here and I was proudly showing him this this is actually from a
UNIVAC computer hmm I love this piece okay now I want to talk a little bit
about memory because you can have logic gates but there's also the matter of
storing what you've computed now here's a recent acquisition I purchased on eBay
and this is some of the earliest computer memory specifically a type
called core memory you can see four squares here each of these squares is
made up of what I believe I've counted is about 1200 separate little tiny
Donuts that have magnetism in them they're little magnetic toroid and
depending on how much electricity you feed through these wires you can change
the magnetic state of that toroid to be positive or negative to be a 0 or a 1
now I've been trying to do the math but my brain is a little mushy today so I
can't figure out exactly how many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
these that this represents but this is a hell of a miniaturization of the
original technology and this is still ludicrously primitive to what we
currently have because this is another acquisition
this is a silicon wafer on which modern computer chips are printed at such a
resolution that each one of these tiny little disco dots you can see shining in
the camera each one of those is a separate computer chip with hundreds of
thousands of these edged in it yeah that's the level of miniaturization that
we have gotten to and I find I love the story that objects like this tell about
how far we've come in our ingenuity