The Machine that Changed the World (1992)

The Machine That Changed the World is a 5-episode television series on the history of electronic digital computers. It was written and directed by Nancy Linde, and produced by WGBH

WGBH-TV

WGBH-TV, channel 2, is a non-commercial educational public television station located in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. WGBH-TV is a member station of the Public Broadcasting Service , and produces more than two-thirds of PBS's national prime time television programming...

Television of Boston, Massachusetts, and the British Broadcasting Corporation

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

. Backers included the Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

, the National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

, and the UNISYS

Unisys

Unisys Corporation , headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a long established business whose core products now involves computing and networking.-History:...

Corporation.

The first three episodes deal with the history of fully electronic general-purpose digital computers from the ENIAC

ENIAC

ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was a Turing-complete digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems....

through desktop microcomputers. The pre-history of such machines is examined in the first episode ("Giant Brains"), and includes a discussion of the contributions of Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage, FRS was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer...

, Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace , born Augusta Ada Byron, was an English writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine...

, Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

, and others. The fourth episode ("The Thinking Machine") explores the topic of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

. The fifth episode ("The World at Your FIngertips") explores the then-newly-emerging worldwide networking of computers. All episodes begin and end with a song by Peter Howell

Peter Howell

Peter Howell is a musician and composer. He is best known for his work on Doctor Who as a member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop....

, "Stellae matutinae radius exoritur" ("The morning star's ray arises").

External links

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