Beginning of the End or End of the Beginning?
summary
One hundred and five rapid slides trace concrete milestones: Ada Lovelace writes programs for Babbage, Grace Murray Hopper finds a moth and coins “bug”, claims that free software predates the 1980s, and explains why Unix becomes portable by being rewritten in C with pipes and filters from Doug McIlroy. A working briefcase supercomputer is built and demonstrated, and the talk cites that 485 of the Top500 machines run Linux, arguing economics over pure technical merit.
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chapters (30)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:35Programmable machines and Jacquard loom
- 4:07Steam engines and IP laws
- 6:36Babbage and Analytical Engine
- 8:40Hollerith and tabulating machines
- 10:25Turing and Turing machine
- 11:51Zuse and early computers
- 13:19Bletchley Park code-breaking
- 16:26Aiken and Mark II
- 21:19Terms like 'computer' and 'bug'
- 23:47ENIAC and electronic computers
- 25:35EDSAC and stored-program computers
- 27:22Grace Hopper and COBOL
- 28:28Vendor lock-in myths
- 30:16Free software origins
- 33:05Software DIY culture
- 36:43Birth of UNIX
- 39:55Portability and C language
- 41:22ARPANET and early internet
- 42:48Personal computing and CP/M
- 44:55Software as product
- 47:45UNIX licensing: System V vs BSD
- 48:51Richard Stallman and GNU
- 50:18Copyright and patents impact
- 51:22Betamax vs VHS
- 52:30Linux kernel revolution
- 53:58Linux in servers and embedded
- 55:44Marketability vs technical merit
- 56:53Future of computing
- 59:53Tech and society predictions
