50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford

That's the language of computers. Every clever thing your computer does, make a call,

search a database, play a game, comes down to zeros and ones.

Actually that's not quite true. It comes down to the presence or absence of a current

in tiny transistors on a semiconductor chip. The zero or one millido notes if the current

is off or on. Thankfully we don't have to program computers in zeros and ones. Imagine

how difficult that would be. Microsoft Windows for example takes up 20 gigabytes of space

on my hard drive. That's 170 billion zeros and ones. Print them out and the stack of

A4 paper would be 4 kilometers high. Now imagine you had to work through those pages

setting every transistor manually. We'll ignore how fiddly this would be. Transistors measure

just billions of a meter. If it took a second to flip each switch, installing windows would

take 5,000 years. Early computers really did have to be programmed rather like this.

Consider the automatic sequence controlled calculator, later known as the Harford Mark 1.

It was a 15 meter long, two and a half meter high, concatenation of wheels and shafts

and gears and switches. It contained 530 miles of wires. It word away under instruction

from a roll of perforated paper tape. If you wanted it to solve a new equation, you had

to work out which switches should be on or off, which wires should be plugged in where.

Designed to expedite all forms of mathematical and scientific research. Then you had to flip

all the switches, plug all the wires and punch all the holes in the paper tape. Programming

it was a challenge to stretch the mind of a mathematical genius. Four decades on from

the Harford Mark 1, more compact and user-friendly machines like the Commodore 64 were finding

their way into schools. If you're around my age, early 40s, you may remember the childhood

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