WEBVTT

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:33.120
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  

00:00:33.120 --> 00:01:05.186
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.

00:01:05.186 --> 00:01:31.680
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,  

00:01:31.680 --> 00:02:05.015
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

00:02:05.015 --> 00:02:34.240
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,  

00:02:34.240 --> 00:03:06.640
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  

00:03:06.640 --> 00:03:32.480
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  

00:03:32.480 --> 00:04:02.883
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.

00:04:02.883 --> 00:04:33.760
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  

00:04:33.760 --> 00:05:03.280
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  

00:05:03.280 --> 00:05:30.480
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  

00:05:30.480 --> 00:06:01.120
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  

00:06:01.120 --> 00:06:37.440
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  

00:06:37.440 --> 00:07:02.800
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  

00:07:02.800 --> 00:07:20.873
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.