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Retrotechtacular: 1960s Doc Calls Computers The Universal Machine [Hackaday]
It’s weird to think that an abacus would have still been used sixty years ago, or so posits the documentary series The Computer and the Mind of Man. This six part series originally aired on San Francisco local television station KQED in 1962, a time where few people outside of academia had even stood next to such a device.
Episode 3 titled “The Universal Machine” was dedicated to teaching the public how a computer can enhance every type of business provided humans can sufficiently describe it in coded logic. Though mainly filtered through IBM’s perspective as the company was responsible for funding the set of films; learning how experts of the time contextualized the computer’s potential was illuminating.
The real meat of the episode was the interview with Dr. Charles Decarlo, who was the director of education at IBM at the time. He explained how a major obstacle to the progression of the medium was the development of programming languages like Fortran and Algol. How these programming languages are structured was a key point of emphasis as to distinguish them from spoken languages, because the order in which the words appear matters more to a machine than the context of those words. As much as we might like for our computers (and other humans) to understand sarcasm…it only complicates communication on the other end.
Everything in the documentary sounds appropriately science-fictiony. Lots of boops and bleeps paired with discordant strings are punctuated by that prototypical narrator voice over where everything is pointedly enunciated. Thanks goes to [William] for uploading the series to YouTube and for reminding us how great the acronym GIGO is. In other words, “Garbage in, garbage out.”
“The computer, the universal machine; in that it is capable of doing whatever we are capable of instructing it to do.”
– Narrator, The Computer and The Mind of Man (1962)
Also just in case you missed it, there’s another great Retrotechtacular post on crash testing trucks with a soundtrack that is everything you would hope it would be.