The Creation of the Computer
The machines at the center of the information age have revolutionized our lives and digitalized our world, making previously unthinkable tasks automatic and linking people from around the planet.
Modern Marvels® presents a fascinating exploration into the history of the computer. See Charles Babbage's Victorian "counting machine," a mechanical computer that produced perfect results for any mathematical problem of six figures or less, and discover how IBM was launched through a punch-card counting machine built to accelerate the 1890 census.
Trace the technological advancements that led to the first modern computers and witness the rapid progress that allowed them to shrink from room-sized monsters to the desktop units that revolutionized life in the '90s.
The Creation of the Computer journeys into the fast-paced world of technology and innovation to expose the phenomenal history of the most influential invention of modern times.
Please advise...While in Chrome, we get the message "this movie does not exist" for "The Creation of the Computer" It is a GREAT pictorial of the history of computing...
Babbage also invented the steam driven can opener.
Shameful for no mention of Turing. 1 star for me.
Check out a guy called Tommy Flowers (yes thats his real name) He built the first computer. This program is USA version of history
WTF are you talking about? Babbage built the first computer, he was ENGLISH.
He's talking about England's lame attempt to rewrite computing history and claim that Colossus was the first computer. Colossus is not an actual Turing-complete programmable electronic computer, and nothing built by Babbage was Turing-complete either. They're calculation devices, but they're not actual computers. ENIAC is still the first Turing-complete programmable electronic computer, upon which the entire modern computing industry directly evolved from. The first Turing-complete computer of any type was the electromechanical Zuse Z3, built in Germany and destroyed during the war. Babbage's Analytical Engine would've been theoretically Turing-complete, but it was never built.
England's key contribution to the early history of computers was Alan Turing, but of course England's treatment of Turing ultimately drove him to commit suicide, so the Brits are a little sensitive about the whole thing now.
@G
it may be dated but the concept is still accurate and valid. It is interesting to note that the fundamental pressure behind the design of computers is the need for mathematical information.
Suggest include the year in the title, i.e, "The Creation of the Computer (1995)".
I have a degree in computer science; this was quite a good documentary for its kind in 1995. It still has merit, but is by now terribly dated.
Didn't Modern Marvels do a more recent episode on basically the same story?
How pedestrian.
Pretty good documentary for elementary school classes and such
Cool documentary. It was certainly right to predict that computers would become more interconnected.