Hello, and welcome to a new series I’m going to be doing on this channel, going over how
different things in our life were 100 years ago.
So, you know the 10 years challenge that was recently a thing on Instagram?
Well yeah, this series will be called the 100 Years Challenge, because it’s kind of
the same thing, basically looking at what different things in our current world were
like 100 years ago.
This first episode will be about computers, as this is also a collab with Jordan, from
the up and coming channel everydAI, so stick around for more on that.
So, the year is 1919, World War I had just ended, London was the world’s largest city
with an impressive 7 million people, and the world had a population of 1.9 billion, which
was kind of being set back because everyone was dying of the flu.
Now, what did computers look like back then?
Well, obviously they weren’t on the verge of playing Oregon Trail or unlocking the internet,
but that doesn’t mean there weren’t still advancements being made.
In fact, there had already been many advancements over the previous century, notably in machines
that processed data using punch cards, like Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s design for a programmable,
automatic loom, known as a Jacquard machine.
Very creative.
It’s going to be important to keep things like these in mind though, because there is
a big difference between regular machines and computers.
To take a page out of CGP Grey’s book, like I do in pretty much all my videos, it’s
best (at least for these purposes) to think of machines as mechanical muscles, whereas
computers are mechanical minds.
In short, a car can move itself, but it can’t decide where to go without human, or computer,
input.
Now, back in these times, it’s probably better to think of computers as more like
calculators, because that’s essentially what computers are.
In fact, computer operations are to this day basically just a bunch of little math operations
being solved at a somewhat nauseating speed.
Yeah, I didn’t do well in math class.
In fact, computers were recently being used to do things that were getting pretty complicated
to do on pencil and paper.
For one good example, in every year ending with a 0, the US government likes to do a
census of the entire country, but with a population approaching massive numbers by the end of
the 19th century, that was getting to be almost impossible.
Just a couple decades earlier, the 1890 census was rife with trouble, counting 62 million
total Americans, and the already large population was only getting bigger.
In fact, it wasn’t just the amount of Americans that had to be merely counted, but also to
record information about households, immigration, ethnicity, age, gender, marital status, whether
or not they served in the Civil War (and on which side), health records, ability to speak
English, literacy, and the list goes on.
However, the issue wasn’t necessarily getting around the US to collect the data, but how
to process all the data once it was collected.
This job turned out to be one for a machine called the tabulator, or the tabulating machine
if you want to be boring.
Herman Hollerith’s tabulator was an electromechanical machine what was specially designed to collect
data cards with holes that were punched through by whoever filled out the census form.
I would highly recommend this video, if you want to know more of the technical details.
With the machine, it took 6.5 years to finish processing the census, which is a long time,
but still meant that, had the US government not had the machine, the census would have
taken past the year 1900 to fully process, making it outdated by the time a new census
needed to be conducted, which is kind of a problem because that’s what our electoral
maps are based on.
The US government would continue to use Hollerith’s machine with great success, and Hollerith,
along with some other executives, started up the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company
in 1911, which was eventually renamed to the International Business Machines Corporation,
or IBM.
Throughout the 19th century however, there was another computer design being built, known
as the analytical engine.
Designed by English mathematician and bloke who did some computer stuff before it was
cool Charles Babbage way back in 1837, the analytical engine was a general-purpose computer,
eventually built by Babbage’s youngest son Henry, and described as a kind of successor
to Charles’ previous work, the difference engine, a kind of automatic, mechanical calculator,
designed to tabulate polynomial functions.
The analytical engine expanded on its predecessor, and also featured an arithmetic logic unit,
and integrated memory, which meant that its logical structure was basically the same as
our modern, electronic computers.
Or, as you probably think of them, computers, making them the first Turing-complete computers.
Well, sort of, Alan Turing was born in 1912, so that was a bit later on.
However, due to conflicts between Babbage and his chief engineer, and also funding issues,
none of his machine designs were actually built until the 1940s, over 70 years after
his death.
However, even though these analog computers were thought to be the future of computing
throughout the early 20th century, they would eventually be phased out in favor of digital
computers, kind of like what we use today to make videos about their ancestors.
Analog computers actually still exist today, but they aren’t quite as accurate most of
the time, and… you could be probably be forgiven for not realizing they’re even
a thing.
This video was made in collaboration with everydAI, a channel all about artificial intelligence,
run by PhD student Jordan Harrod, who knows a hell of a lot more about computers and AI
than I could ever truly explain.
She made a video about the history of artificial intelligence, so if you want to learn more
about the history of computers from someone who actually knows what they’re talking
about, be sure to check her video out, as well.
Also, if you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, share it, and if you’re
able, support the channel like these amazing patrons right here.
Be sure to subscribe to KhAnubis and everydAI, so you can learn something new every Sunday…
and Friday.