social networking in the '50s and '60s was big business. All right man, we found that out right away. Back then, the interface was a lot more friendly. I don't mean to be personal service congratulations. Oh, thanks. Did you mean to say whether the twins were boys or girls, sir? How could I forgotten that there are boys? And you understand it's a regular telegram, of course. Oh, it sure. This is dude who else would like to get the good news. Well, this goes to about a different people. I have a lot more writing to do here. That won't be necessary. You'll just put down your list of addresses, and we'll see that they all get the message, of course. Well, a century had passed since Samuel Morse peed out the first Telegraph message, which read, What hath God wrought. Now operators keyed teletype machines, punching binary code into paper tape for electronics communication. A quick tap of the keyboard and another punch the key signal that will guide the message automatically to its destination. Now it's gone already arriving at Syracuse high-speed.

message center for the territory in which the telegram originated, and from the great major message centers spring a multitude of connecting circuits, directly linking thousands of towns and cities, large and small, throughout our country with this vast ultra-modern automatic telegraph system, the finest asset in the world. Yes, we caught it Speedway forwards, a speedway extending far and wide within our shores and even beyond, to and from any part of a globe coming online in 1948. The plan 55a perforator telegraphy network connected coast-to-coast with instantaneous electronic communication, part can be part human, part massive computer teletypes connected the world. Here is the way graffiti, a threatening millions of words across thousands of miles problematic, guided and controlled by the magic brain of an almost infallible system, speeding messages to destinations with just the push of a button, to better serve America everywhere, to bring distant friends and business customers within arm's reach through the swiftness of the yellow brain, a long way.

from the old hand, a hand relay from point to point slow and at the mercy of human error. [Music] Here is the thin white ribbon of words, unchangeable, accurate, moving the message it carries lightning-fast, visible transcript of assemblers profit, actual record of what has been said. With the advent of the Information Age, English professor Marshall McLuhan, director of Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, described the effects on society and became a popular culture phenomenon. Yeah, I don't think privacy has quite the same meaning in our time that it used to have. I know, for example, a big business in Toronto where all the private offices have been dissolved, all the walls have been pulled out so that the participants in this business can sit together around tables in the middle of the big office space so that they can watch each other's responses to stocks, world events, and so on. They want a perpetual dialogue going on among themselves as a response to world events. The Family Circle has widened, mom and dad, the world pool of

information constantly pouring in on your closely-knit family is influencing them a lot more than you think. The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us all at once. Ours is a brand new world of all at once. This time innocence a ceased and space is benched. We now live in a global village about awaking a simultaneous happening. Large vacuum tubes are being replaced by transistors to make the switches in digital circuitry, which could be either open or closed, on or off. The roots of the electronic age reach back into the early years of our century. In nineteen seven, Dr. Lee DeForest discovered that a grid of fine wire placed between a filament and a metal plate in a vacuum tube could control the flow of electrons between the filament and plate, and the tube could be made to amplify as well as detect electrical waves. The vacuum tube is power-hungry, while a tube like this generally demands a watt or more of the electricity, a millionth of a watt is enough for the

transistor. Transistors will take their place in the complex calculating machines that have often been called electronic brains because they enable man to save days, months, even years in solving mathematical problems. Of course, we cannot build a calculating machine as flexible as the human brain, but even a man-made computer designed to do hundreds of brain-like calculating jobs might need an Empire State Building to house it and a Niagara Falls to power and cool it. If vacuum tubes were used in its construction, substituting transistors for tubes, such a versatile machine could fit into a good-sized room, and power and cooling needs would be relatively low. With the invention of the integrated circuit, transistors became microscopic, embedded within silicon wafers or chips. By 1968, a unit of just 24 microchips could comprise the processing center of a digital computer. Inside, can you see that little silvery surface in there? Yeah, right. Oh, okay, that gray. I need a little bit of silver in there. It's with a silicon, not silver, is what makes a transistor.

computer work. You know, is that the bit for those, the bits in there. There are thousands of bits of story event in that part of the computer. There's a lot of information, of course. Each bit is only on or off, one or zero, true or false. In 1969, young semiconductor manufacturing company Intel was contracted to design a logic chip for calculators. Engineer Ted Hoff proposed to make the chip programmable and universal. It was a major innovation above and beyond integrated circuits and memory chips. By 1974, they released their third such microprocessor, the Intel 8080. It could complete a single instruction cycle in two microseconds, which is a speed of 1/2 one megahertz. But by combining these on/off circumstances, we can get new one enough conditions that we've calculated that didn't exist before. So the computer's logic is making things happen. It's not clear Intel knew that the chips they were selling or even computer chips. Computer scientist Alan Turing hypothesized a fundamental theorem that any machine that has a bare minimum

set of capabilities could simulate the operation of any other computer. You could divide, and if you could simulate the other operation, then that could run a code that has been written for any of those other computers. One man was inspired by a pitch. Nev Alda király implications. He not only wrote a computer language called PLM for this microprocessor event. The autumn of 1974 in his garden shed, he successfully booted up the first ever functional microcomputer operating system. It was called CPM, and its inventor was a young computer science teacher named Gary Kildall. Kildall had started developing his control program for microcomputers, also known as control program monitor, in the early 1970s when he realized the potential for a general-purpose small computer. He was carrying a portable computer at a time when the desktop PC was just a dream. Well, in 1972, in the summer, it was August. I came into the computer science lab late one evening. It was probably about 2:00 a.m. in the morning, sitting there doing my work.

in comes a guy with cut-offs on freckles on his face, and he pulls out a leather briefcase, opens it up, and he plugs an ASR 33 in there. Some of you know what that is, it's a teletype, and he plugged it in, and he had a computer. I went absolutely nuts. I wanted to know where he got it. Apparently, he got it from Ted Hoff over here. I wanted to find out how I could even get involved in that, and that was the beginning of my friendship with Gary. Tom was hired to work at Digital Research, the company run by Gary Kildall and his wife Dorothy McEwen out of their home in Pacific Grove, California. One night, Tom dragged a confused Intel employee, John Wharton, back to the house where Gary explained to him the inevitable coming decade. The time that Tom Erlander grabbed me from the workshop and brought me back to a 2-1 lighthouse introduced me to Gary. I didn't know quite what was going on, but Gary basically launched into a lecture.

about this potential and what could happen. And here's what the software has to be. And here's what the first generation will be. And here's what the second generation will be. And then we're going to have to worry about multiply programming. And at some point, remote connectivity is going to be important. So then we have networked operating systems. But they all have to run the same software because you don't want to have to write new editors when you go from being this one thing on your desktop to something that's running on another system halfway across the country. And they'll be comfortable. You can put multiple computers together. You can get them to cooperate. You can get them communicate, share memory. You can get them to pass messages back and forth and run multiple tasks. I mean it was just this weird vision I had never heard anything like that within Intel, the company that was making the chips. Nobody knew that's where the industry was headed. So what was fun then was sitting back as he was teaching me about these things. He'd occasionally grab a

reference manual and give it to me and say there's a lot more here he'd grab an eight and a half inch floppy doesn't say here that's the utility here's the operator he was just you know a real corporation doesn't give stuff away to strangers that's what really actually happened he created this operating system and and built it around this Intel microprocessor to show what could be done with microprocessors and in 1975 when he was doing this that was pretty revolutionary it was the future and it belonged to gary kildall while a consultant at Intel in the 70s he offered to seldom CPM but Intel could see no use for it and turned him down at the same time in New Mexico a calculator company created a build-it-yourself computer kit and the design had the Intel 8080 microprocessor as its central processing unit its creator Edie Roberts managed to get it featured on the cover of popular electronics magazine when University students Paul Allen and Bill

Gates saw the MIT's Altair 8800. They were taken by surprise. It was kind of, in a way, you know, good news, bad news. Here was someone making a computer around this chip, in exactly the way that Paul had talked to me, and you know, we thought about what kind of software could be done for it, and it was happening without us. Their small software company, Microsoft, needed something quickly in order to ride the wave. They decided to create an easy-to-use programming environment written in the 8080 instruction set and try to sell it to MIT's. Their software would interpret user commands and program source code written in a high-level computer language called BASIC. I see the words print, go to, if, then, input. It's called BASIC, beginners all-purpose symbolic instruction code. It's a general-purpose language for beginners. Shall I run it? Sure. Okay. Oh, that's pretty. So, we, we wrote these. This company immediately and offered to do a BASIC for them, and they thought that was interesting. They called back and said, well, you're serious, you know, we have a

lot of strange people calling us orders. I've been pouring in at MIT's after the Altair was announced. This was unexpected because the computer was basically just a box that blinked. For anyone who didn't understand the low-level machine language of the Intel 8080 instruction set, all you could do is use these switches, actually use them here, and key things in into this front panel, and maybe do a little program that does things in the lights. The front panel switches on the Altair were used to assign the ones and zeros into the computer's memory store. Very much only on/off for me. Yes, no. That's not terribly much. If you want to count, you could count to one, and then you'd be stuck. That's as far as you can go. But by putting bits together, we can make much more things happen. We can store a whole letter of the alphabet or a piece of punctuation in usually a group of eight bits called a byte, and very often you hear about the bytes of storage in a computer. That really means roughly

speaking. The characters that the computer can hold. And since we get a lot of storage in a computer, we often talk about it in kilobytes, which is thousands of characters of storage. It was wise to buy an extra RAM stick. The Altair came with a measly 256 bytes of onboard memory. That was not enough space for any useful software. The user could look at each byte in memory by calling them up for display on the eight lights in the top right of the front panel. When the computer calls up some information from its memory, it calls it up by a number. It may say, I want the contents of location 5,000. I want the location of location contents of location 12,000, that sort of thing. What we call that is an address in memory, and we say in each address there will be a byte of information. The row of 16 switches was used to specify the memory address of the byte you wanted to read or write, usually in sequence. The maximum addressable memory space of the Intel

8080 was 64 kilobytes, which was a lot to work through with your fingers. Maybe 256 bytes of RAM wasn't so bad after all. Now, eventually, we did get controllers for teletypes and cassette tapes and floppy disks, that kind of thing. The ASR 33 teletype had been introduced in 1963, and each of its keyable characters was encoded in 8 bits or 1 byte. This made it a natural fit as an input/output or I/O device for computers. However, the teletype was no replacement for the front panel of the Altair. The bytes had sent and received, representing numbers and letters to the user, would need to be handled by software which honored their meaningful, not binary, nature. A high-level computer language like BASIC would make the teletype a useful human interface. The underlying low-level operations of the Intel 8080 in memory would be invisible and neatly out of the way. But in the early days, it's pretty useless. People just bought it thinking that it would be neat to build.

a computer. Well, it would be if Microsoft was able to deliver the goods. And so, Paul was scheduled to fly out to Albuquerque. He decided to go get some sleep. I stayed up all night reading the book to see if we miscoded some of the instructions and finally decided it was all ok. Punch out the paper tape and made sure Paul got that before he went off on his plane. And he took the basic 2 myths and loaded up in the paper tape. Yeah, he wrote the bootstrap loader that is the thing enough to key in to make this computer smart enough to know to go get data off the teletype to read it into memory. He wrote that on the plane on the way out. It was actually 46 bytes, the first one. I eventually wrote one in 17 bytes, but anyway, and 3 and 0. All right, now at this point the program has been entered. That's the bootstrap loader with enough smarts to read the paper tape, turn on the teletype. And I'm gonna hit run the first time for some.

reason it didn't work takes about 7 to 8 minutes to load elevates it the second time they loaded in and it worked alright nice when that noise finally stops and he typed in a program you know print two plus two or two he had to print out squares and sums and and things like that and he and and Roberts that of this company sat there and they were amazed by you know did this thing work Microsoft was in business and the microcomputer revolution was well underway after the mitts do-it-yourself hobby computer micro computers were sold preassembled and automatically booted into a basic interpreter which came factory installed into permanent read-only memory. The Commodore pet came with a Microsoft basic in ROM on launch while the Apple 2 and Tandy trs-80 only licensed Microsoft versions of basic in later revisions. It was simple since basic was in ROM it was impossible to erase your computer was guaranteed to always boot up except in the case of Hardware damage you couldn't mess up the

operating system. If you tried since there was no multitasking, starting and closing programs was easy. Before you start a new program, you must get rid of the old one. Otherwise, the computer will get all confused. Oh, ok. Well, I'll just turn the computer off then on again. You could, but there's a better way. You can simply tell the computer to get ready for a new program. Type new and that will wipe everything out of its random access memory. Ok, now clear the screen. Clear. Good. Some computer manufacturers like Atari Ram software distributed on removable bootable ROM cartridges, which were inserted into a hardware slot. This was also how software was distributed for the Mattel Intellivision and Nintendo video game consoles. But just because all the computer's Ram basic and most implementations of basic were by the same company doesn't mean their software was compatible. Do you mean there are different sorts of basic? Let's say that there are many different dialects of basically. For example, Apple Basic is not the same as PET Basic or Atari Basic. That's one of the reasons.

why many ready-made computer programs aren't interchangeable between different computers and on top of that there's all the other languages APL COBOL Fortran Pascal. It's like the United Nations. Yes, I'm afraid it is. Each computer's hardware was different and the software landscape was hopelessly fragmented with so much incompatibility caused by lack of forward thinking and cooperation. What hope was there for the microprocessor software industry now with all of these differences? Is it possible then to transport programs at all? Well, I'd be misleading you if I said that's not possible. There are many systems whereby you can exchange information between computers and one white popular one is called CPM. That stands for control programs microprocessor and I have here in the studio an audible and micro computer and it uses CPM. And what that means is the computer is organized in a certain way with you and that's going to be the same as other enclosing if the multimedia user data documents are the figures of our conscious attention grounded in software then the interface.

is whatever the human imagination can conceive limitless. Cyberspace, if the software application is themselves, are the figure of attention grounded in source code. Then the interface is computer programming paradigms and characters of source code logic. And if the computers themselves are the figures of our conscious attention, then the interface is what's represented on the front panel of the Altair machine code. CPU instruction sets bits and bytes as fundamental as arithmetic or the phonetic alphabet. Computer literacy must involve all three. This is a photograph of late-night traffic chief D at Sobchak taken on December 11th, 1976, at 3:30 in the morning as she received the last message from the plan 55, a national reporter telegraphy Network arriving in Minneapolis, Minnesota. From this time forward, her job would be performed by a computer. Here's a sneak peek of what's coming up on Silicon and Charybdis. We've already reached approximately 1 in every thousand households in the United States, and I think over the next five or six

years that figure will be 1 in 10 ultimately. It will be 1 in 1. There's been too much stuff created, which the society did not have a need for. That much of that kind of information. When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition as another, which destructuring the experience is. Now, with that tons and tons of information, we were able to store. If we organize and index that properly, that means we can replace whole library as maybe even Sunday replace the printed page. Well, UNIX has a long history, and it was first introduced in its most primitive form in 1969. My project is to make all software free.

Silicon & Charybdis I: McLuhan & Microcomputers

Silicon & Charybdis I: McLuhan & Microcomputers