Rise of the Machines: A History of Computer Technology
Taught by Mikhail Voloshin
Mikhail Voloshin is a Gen-X computer nerd currently working at Google, Inc., as a software engineer in the DoubleClick online advertising platform. He's built tactical communication systems for military and first-responder agencies, worked on speech recognition systems at Microsoft and MITRE, patented peer-to-peer data distribution algorithms, and coded a couple of social networking websites that nobody actually uses. He's lived in Chicago, Boston, and Seattle before coming to New York. When he's not coding, he's working on a tech thriller about cybercrime and genetic engineering; come give his writing a +1 Like athttp://dopaminenovel.com!
Here we are. It's 2013, and computers run everything from our entertainment to our transportation to our stock markets. They're so ubiquitous at this point that it's easy to think of computers as a natural resource; they feel like something that's always been available to mankind, like air or rain or sunlight. But these machines are indeed of human creation, and the tale of their invention is worth telling.
Join us on a journey that spans thousands of years, peopled by some of history's most brilliant minds and highlighting their most astonishing achievements. Using live props and replicas as well as diagrams and videos, you'll see how programmable robots were built by the ancient Greeks, and what medieval Arabs used for GPS. You'll see Swiss clockmakers performing intricate mathematical operations using gearwork, and you'll also see how their technological achievements were weaponized during WWII. You'll see how the 19th-century textile industry contributed to the invention of programming. You'll learn about the Allied effort to crack the Nazi ENIGMA code, and how the mathematicians of Bletchley Park developed the theoretical framework for all modern computing. You'll be introduced to the transistor, and discover how photography resulted in the invention of the microchip. You'll walk through the miniaturization and personalization of the computer, from the IBM PDP-11 to the PC to the Apple to the iPod to the Android. You'll see the rise of the Internet, and if you're lucky and time still remains, you'll learn how it got filled with cats.
