WEBVTT 00:00:02.800 --> 00:00:10.952 What I'd like to do now is take you on a very high-level view of the evolution of computer technology. 00:00:15.422 --> 00:00:20.421 The reason for that is to try  and expose some of the changes that we have 00:00:20.480 --> 00:00:26.880 in technology, which obviously influences where  we are today. And at different points during the   00:00:26.880 --> 00:00:33.120 history of the development of computer technology  changes happen which influence the way that people   00:00:33.120 --> 00:00:40.240 work with technology. Most of those still persist  today, so what you see is newer issues emerging,   00:00:40.240 --> 00:00:46.720 but often the old ones are still pertinent.  So, hopefully by giving a sense of the way in   00:00:46.720 --> 00:00:52.838 which the field develops, we are in a better  position to be able to do things now, as well.   00:00:53.360 --> 00:00:58.295 It's not just a historical exercise; it’s about  trying to understand where we are. 00:00:58.295 --> 00:01:05.186 I want to focus on how many computers – a nice numerical count. 00:01:05.890 --> 00:01:09.342 The reason I'm doing that isn't that's the only way of thinking about technology, 00:01:09.342 --> 00:01:13.340 but it acts as a bit of  a proxy for other things like the actual physical 00:01:13.360 --> 00:01:18.960 size of computing. The numbers of computers  increased; the physical size has reduced.   00:01:19.680 --> 00:01:26.000 From rooms full to things you could hold in your  arms. The things you can hold in your hands to   00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:31.680 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 --> 00:01:38.640 the cost. When computers are massively expensive,  you don't have very many of them, but when they’ve   00:01:38.640 --> 00:01:45.680 reduced to perhaps pence or cents each, then  suddenly you can have vast numbers of them.  00:01:45.680 --> 00:01:49.120 So, I'm going to go back to the 1950s,  first of all, so we're talking about   00:01:49.120 --> 00:01:57.637 room-sized computers costing in current terms  millions of dollars or pounds or euros. 00:01:57.637 --> 00:02:05.015 There is a famous misquote of Thomas Watson who was in charge of IBM at that time. That said that 00:02:05.015 --> 00:02:10.953 five computers of the kind they had at that point would be enough forever. In fact, he didn't quite say that.   00:02:12.800 --> 00:02:18.400 You can look at the history of how that emerged  as a misquote, but it wasn't so far from the   00:02:18.400 --> 00:02:24.800 zeitgeist of the time, this belief that a few  huge computers but physically huge and less   00:02:24.800 --> 00:02:28.560 powerful in terms of what their computing,  far less powerful than you’d hold in your   00:02:28.560 --> 00:02:34.240 hand today. That would be enough for anything  that any large corporation, any government,   00:02:34.240 --> 00:02:41.360 any country would ever want. So, think about five  smartphones for all of the world or perhaps all of   00:02:41.360 --> 00:02:48.080 America, or all of Europe, or all of India. And  simply saying, “Well, that will be enough. Who   00:02:48.080 --> 00:02:53.040 could ever want more computing than that?”. And  that was said. It was both about the cost of them   00:02:53.040 --> 00:02:58.057 and everything, but also about this conception.  But what would you use a computer for anyway? 00:03:00.160 --> 00:03:06.640 Move forward to the mid-70s and we have a  different type of picture, so at that point   00:03:06.640 --> 00:03:12.080 the first personal computers were coming through  and you had about 1 personal computer for every   00:03:12.080 --> 00:03:17.360 100,000 people in the world, so still not very  many. It's something that's very specialized,   00:03:17.360 --> 00:03:23.886 but now is something that's coming down to human  size, so the cost is reduced. We're thinking about   00:03:24.560 --> 00:03:32.480 probably still quite a lot of thousands of pounds  or dollars in currency terms. But not so crazily   00:03:32.480 --> 00:03:40.117 different from [the prices] laptops are now. I mean more expensive, but not orders of magnitude more. 00:03:40.117 --> 00:03:45.338 That starts to change your conception  of this device when it becomes human sized. 00:03:48.800 --> 00:03:54.480 I do struggle to find the industry figures  and it depends on what you count as a computer   00:03:54.480 --> 00:03:59.440 and count as a microprocessor. But it's something  of the order of two million PC's and two million   00:03:59.440 --> 00:04:02.883 smartphones are produced each year. 00:04:07.614 --> 00:04:11.351 Certainly in terms of the numbers of computers out there, 00:04:11.360 --> 00:04:18.080 not that everybody has one, but the total number  will exceed the number of people and number of   00:04:18.080 --> 00:04:22.538 smartphones will be commensurate with the number  of people in the world. 00:04:22.947 --> 00:04:29.076 If you actually look at microprocessors, rather than computers in boxes, or in phones, but actual 00:04:29.076 --> 00:04:33.760 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 --> 00:04:40.560 several in the camera that I'm looking at now,  let alone within a laptop or computer. Then we're   00:04:40.560 --> 00:04:47.913 talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of  microprocessors per each person on the planet.   00:04:48.240 --> 00:04:53.680 It does depend a bit on how functional you think  of something as being a computer is just being   00:04:53.680 --> 00:04:58.868 a piece of electronics and it's a bit of debate  there. But some of that is things that you can   00:04:58.880 --> 00:05:03.280 start to get a feel for, like a smart bulb: “Oh  yes, there's a microprocessor in there”. But also   00:05:03.280 --> 00:05:08.720 if you go into a modern railway carriage,  there will be hundreds of microprocessors   00:05:08.720 --> 00:05:15.134 embedded in that, doing everything from the  lighting to the doors and environmental control. 00:05:16.480 --> 00:05:20.640 So, really, these things are so tiny you don't  even know that they are there, but they're   00:05:20.640 --> 00:05:24.560 doing more and more of the functions that you  might have in the past actually used a switch for   00:05:24.560 --> 00:05:30.480 but doing them in slightly different ways.  An example of this that I worked on in the   00:05:30.480 --> 00:05:36.164 wild. I should say being used, is a system we called Firefly. It has a different commercial name, 00:05:36.164 --> 00:05:43.545 but basically if you imagine an hotel  and you see all those white lights in the trees outside. 00:05:43.576 --> 00:05:49.533 We thought what if all of those little  lights in the trees could become displays? 00:05:49.533 --> 00:05:55.440 Well, if it was a hotel and there's a wedding going to  happen in the hotel, what if all those tree lights   00:05:55.440 --> 00:06:01.120 gave the name of the couple about to get married,  moving gradually through the lights, twiddling   00:06:01.120 --> 00:06:08.640 round? Wouldn't that be lovely? We investigated a  number of ways this could be done and in the end   00:06:08.640 --> 00:06:15.360 moved for putting a single microprocessor behind  every LED. In fact in the commercial version   00:06:15.360 --> 00:06:22.124 there are 1.2 microprocessors behind every LED.  But the first prototype had one microprocessor,   00:06:22.800 --> 00:06:29.840 one computer per pixel. That sounds like crazy,  massive overkill. There's an installation of this   00:06:29.840 --> 00:06:37.440 in Zurich railway station, which I'm not sure  exact count, but tens of thousands, maybe not   00:06:37.440 --> 00:06:46.075 far short, of 100,000 lights. Vast numbers  of lights, so in a cubic meter you could see   00:06:46.160 --> 00:06:49.920 thousands of lights. We had a Christmas  tree with this in and it had a thousand   00:06:49.920 --> 00:06:54.227 lights in a Christmas tree that was the  size of a person, the height of a person.   00:06:54.800 --> 00:07:02.800 So, thousands of lights, but that meant thousands  of computers just in front of you. And we imagined   00:07:02.800 --> 00:07:06.800 that maybe at some point this would end up in  domestic environments. So, at Christmas, when you   00:07:06.800 --> 00:07:12.432 turned on your Christmas tree, you might have  a thousand computers turning on in your house. 00:07:13.040 --> 00:07:20.873 Lots and lots of computers because they're  cheap, commoditized volume products.