How technology revolutionised our lives

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a special edition of the History Hour, Max Pearson looks back at some of the major technological milestones of recent years. We hear about the Californian computer club where the founders of Apple cut their teeth, about the inventors of the webcam and about the unlikely pioneers of home shopping. Plus, the launch of the iPhone and one of the very first social networks.

PHOTO: Len Shustek, former member of the Homebrew Computer Club.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson
0:09.7	the past brought to life by those who were there. Today we've got a special edition focusing
0:14.7	on the technology which is helping to hold the planet together in these very
0:18.3	difficult times. We've got the launch of a pioneering social network which you
0:22.2	probably won't have heard of.
0:23.8	We were all over the world.
0:25.4	I remember visiting Sweden, and we had a huge number of users in Sweden.
0:29.3	We were allowing the early adopters to invite other early adopters to participate.
0:34.4	Also how live pictures of a coffee pot became the first webcam images to go viral.
0:39.4	We discovered that people were connecting and looking at this image of the pot from different
0:44.5	time zones and sometimes it was the middle of the night for us.
0:47.7	We got email saying that people couldn't see it.
0:49.9	Plus the launch of the iPhone and how British pensioners embraced TV shopping.
0:55.7	We were doing something which today is so commonplace, but back then was so new.
1:01.8	We were 15 to 20 years ahead of our time. But first, technology is right now keeping
1:06.9	millions of people in work, even as all over the world governments are insisting that we stay
1:11.6	at home to curtail as much as possible the spread of the coronavirus.
1:15.0	For the past few weeks I've been recording this podcast from my back bedroom.
1:19.0	We can only do this because of the huge advances in computing and communications which have happened in recent decades.
1:26.0	So this week we're plundering the archives to bring you the stories behind some of those advances.
1:30.8	And we start in 1975 when a group of American computer enthusiasts first got together in California.
1:37.0	They call themselves the Home Brew Computer Club,
	...

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