What I'd like to do now is take you on a very high-level view of the evolution of computer technology. The reason for that is to try and expose some of the changes that we have in technology, which obviously influences where we are today. And at different points during the history of the development of computer technology changes happen which influence the way that people
work with technology. Most of those still persist today, so what you see is newer issues emerging, but often the old ones are still pertinent. So, hopefully by giving a sense of the way in which the field develops, we are in a better position to be able to do things now, as well. It's not just a historical exercise; it’s about trying to understand where we are. I want to focus on how many computers – a nice numerical count.
The reason I'm doing that isn't that's the only way of thinking about technology, but it acts as a bit of a proxy for other things like the actual physical size of computing. The numbers of computers increased; the physical size has reduced. From rooms full to things you could hold in your arms. The things you can hold in your hands to things that are now so small you can't see them. So, there's a sense at the physical size. Also,
the cost. When computers are massively expensive, you don't have very many of them, but when they’ve reduced to perhaps pence or cents each, then suddenly you can have vast numbers of them. So, I'm going to go back to the 1950s, first of all, so we're talking about room-sized computers costing in current terms millions of dollars or pounds or euros. There is a famous misquote of Thomas Watson who was in charge of IBM at that time. That said that
five computers of the kind they had at that point would be enough forever. In fact, he didn't quite say that. You can look at the history of how that emerged as a misquote, but it wasn't so far from the zeitgeist of the time, this belief that a few huge computers but physically huge and less powerful in terms of what their computing, far less powerful than you’d hold in your hand today. That would be enough for anything that any large corporation, any government,
any country would ever want. So, think about five smartphones for all of the world or perhaps all of America, or all of Europe, or all of India. And simply saying, “Well, that will be enough. Who could ever want more computing than that?”. And that was said. It was both about the cost of them and everything, but also about this conception. But what would you use a computer for anyway? Move forward to the mid-70s and we have a different type of picture, so at that point
the first personal computers were coming through and you had about 1 personal computer for every 100,000 people in the world, so still not very many. It's something that's very specialized, but now is something that's coming down to human size, so the cost is reduced. We're thinking about probably still quite a lot of thousands of pounds or dollars in currency terms. But not so crazily
different from [the prices] laptops are now. I mean more expensive, but not orders of magnitude more. That starts to change your conception of this device when it becomes human sized. I do struggle to find the industry figures and it depends on what you count as a computer and count as a microprocessor. But it's something of the order of two million PC's and two million smartphones are produced each year.
Certainly in terms of the numbers of computers out there, not that everybody has one, but the total number will exceed the number of people and number of smartphones will be commensurate with the number of people in the world. If you actually look at microprocessors, rather than computers in boxes, or in phones, but actual microprocessor units – the thing that's in the video camera that I'm looking at now. In fact, there's probably
several in the camera that I'm looking at now, let alone within a laptop or computer. Then we're talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of microprocessors per each person on the planet. It does depend a bit on how functional you think of something as being a computer is just being a piece of electronics and it's a bit of debate there. But some of that is things that you can start to get a feel for, like a smart bulb: “Oh yes, there's a microprocessor in there”. But also
if you go into a modern railway carriage, there will be hundreds of microprocessors embedded in that, doing everything from the lighting to the doors and environmental control. So, really, these things are so tiny you don't even know that they are there, but they're doing more and more of the functions that you might have in the past actually used a switch for but doing them in slightly different ways. An example of this that I worked on in the
wild. I should say being used, is a system we called Firefly. It has a different commercial name, but basically if you imagine an hotel and you see all those white lights in the trees outside. We thought what if all of those little lights in the trees could become displays? Well, if it was a hotel and there's a wedding going to happen in the hotel, what if all those tree lights gave the name of the couple about to get married, moving gradually through the lights, twiddling
round? Wouldn't that be lovely? We investigated a number of ways this could be done and in the end moved for putting a single microprocessor behind every LED. In fact in the commercial version there are 1.2 microprocessors behind every LED. But the first prototype had one microprocessor, one computer per pixel. That sounds like crazy, massive overkill. There's an installation of this in Zurich railway station, which I'm not sure exact count, but tens of thousands, maybe not
far short, of 100,000 lights. Vast numbers of lights, so in a cubic meter you could see thousands of lights. We had a Christmas tree with this in and it had a thousand lights in a Christmas tree that was the size of a person, the height of a person. So, thousands of lights, but that meant thousands of computers just in front of you. And we imagined
that maybe at some point this would end up in domestic environments. So, at Christmas, when you turned on your Christmas tree, you might have a thousand computers turning on in your house. Lots and lots of computers because they're cheap, commoditized volume products.