WEBVTT 00:00:00.106 --> 00:00:01.530 So the machine I'm going to talk you about 00:00:01.530 --> 00:00:03.204 is what I call the greatest machine that never was. 00:00:03.204 --> 00:00:05.203 It was a machine that was never built, 00:00:05.203 --> 00:00:07.583 and yet, it will be built. 00:00:07.583 --> 00:00:09.575 It was a machine that was designed 00:00:09.575 --> 00:00:11.926 long before anyone thought about computers. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:11.926 --> 00:00:14.075 If you know anything about the history of computers, 00:00:14.075 --> 00:00:16.595 you will know that in the '30s and the '40s, 00:00:16.595 --> 00:00:19.150 simple computers were created 00:00:19.150 --> 00:00:21.943 that started the computer revolution we have today, 00:00:21.943 --> 00:00:23.229 and you would be correct, 00:00:23.229 --> 00:00:25.711 except for you'd have the wrong century. 00:00:25.711 --> 00:00:27.351 The first computer was really designed 00:00:27.351 --> 00:00:31.023 in the 1830s and 1840s, not the 1930s and 1940s. 00:00:31.023 --> 00:00:33.351 It was designed, and parts of it were prototyped, 00:00:33.351 --> 00:00:35.487 and the bits of it that were built are here 00:00:35.487 --> 00:00:37.480 in South Kensington. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:37.480 --> 00:00:40.799 That machine was built by this guy, Charles Babbage. 00:00:40.799 --> 00:00:42.555 Now, I have a great affinity for Charles Babbage 00:00:42.555 --> 00:00:45.164 because his hair is always completely unkempt like this 00:00:45.164 --> 00:00:47.505 in every single picture. (Laughter) 00:00:47.505 --> 00:00:49.352 He was a very wealthy man, and a sort of, 00:00:49.352 --> 00:00:51.365 part of the aristocracy of Britain, 00:00:51.365 --> 00:00:53.704 and on a Saturday night in Marylebone, 00:00:53.704 --> 00:00:56.135 were you part of the intelligentsia of that period, 00:00:56.135 --> 00:00:57.631 you would have been invited round to his house 00:00:57.631 --> 00:01:00.590 for a soiree — and he invited everybody: 00:01:00.590 --> 00:01:04.022 kings, the Duke of Wellington, many, many famous people — 00:01:04.022 --> 00:01:06.543 and he would have shown you one of his mechanical machines. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:06.543 --> 00:01:09.583 I really miss that era, you know, where you could 00:01:09.583 --> 00:01:11.931 go around for a soiree and see a mechanical computer 00:01:11.931 --> 00:01:13.044 get demonstrated to you. (Laughter) 00:01:13.044 --> 00:01:16.310 But Babbage, Babbage himself was born 00:01:16.310 --> 00:01:18.044 at the end of the 18th century, 00:01:18.044 --> 00:01:20.088 and was a fairly famous mathematician. 00:01:20.088 --> 00:01:23.231 He held the post that Newton held at Cambridge, 00:01:23.231 --> 00:01:25.743 and that was recently held by Stephen Hawking. 00:01:25.743 --> 00:01:28.598 He's less well known than either of them because 00:01:28.598 --> 00:01:31.748 he got this idea to make mechanical computing devices 00:01:31.748 --> 00:01:34.033 and never made any of them. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:34.033 --> 00:01:37.318 The reason he never made any of them, he's a classic nerd. 00:01:37.318 --> 00:01:39.329 Every time he had a good idea, he'd think, 00:01:39.329 --> 00:01:40.777 "That's brilliant, I'm going to start building that one. 00:01:40.777 --> 00:01:43.372 I'll spend a fortune on it. I've got a better idea. 00:01:43.372 --> 00:01:45.732 I'm going to work on this one. (Laughter) And I'm going to do this one." 00:01:45.732 --> 00:01:48.612 He did this until Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister, 00:01:48.612 --> 00:01:51.076 basically kicked him out of Number 10 Downing Street, 00:01:51.076 --> 00:01:53.517 and kicking him out, in those days, that meant saying, 00:01:53.517 --> 00:01:56.669 "I bid you good day, sir." (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:01:56.669 --> 00:01:58.649 The thing he designed was this monstrosity here, 00:01:58.649 --> 00:02:02.088 the analytical engine. Now, just to give you an idea of this, 00:02:02.088 --> 00:02:03.960 this is a view from above. 00:02:03.960 --> 00:02:07.073 Every one of these circles is a cog, a stack of cogs, 00:02:07.073 --> 00:02:10.309 and this thing is as big as a steam locomotive. 00:02:10.309 --> 00:02:12.300 So as I go through this talk, I want you to imagine 00:02:12.300 --> 00:02:14.944 this gigantic machine. We heard those wonderful sounds 00:02:14.944 --> 00:02:16.704 of what this thing would have sounded like. 00:02:16.704 --> 00:02:18.481 And I'm going to take you through the architecture of the machine 00:02:18.481 --> 00:02:19.960 — that's why it's computer architecture — 00:02:19.960 --> 00:02:23.287 and tell you about this machine, which is a computer. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:23.287 --> 00:02:26.690 So let's talk about the memory. The memory 00:02:26.690 --> 00:02:28.937 is very like the memory of a computer today, 00:02:28.937 --> 00:02:31.639 except it was all made out of metal, 00:02:31.639 --> 00:02:35.183 stacks and stacks of cogs, 30 cogs high. 00:02:35.183 --> 00:02:37.253 Imagine a thing this high of cogs, 00:02:37.253 --> 00:02:39.008 hundreds and hundreds of them, 00:02:39.008 --> 00:02:40.898 and they've got numbers on them. 00:02:40.898 --> 00:02:43.317 It's a decimal machine. Everything's done in decimal. 00:02:43.317 --> 00:02:44.902 And he thought about using binary. The problem 00:02:44.902 --> 00:02:46.620 with using binary is that the machine would have been so 00:02:46.620 --> 00:02:49.937 tall, it would have been ridiculous. As it is, it's enormous. 00:02:49.937 --> 00:02:51.996 So he's got memory. 00:02:51.996 --> 00:02:54.403 The memory is this bit over here. 00:02:54.403 --> 00:02:56.733 You see it all like this. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:56.733 --> 00:03:01.268 This monstrosity over here is the CPU, the chip, if you like. 00:03:01.268 --> 00:03:03.518 Of course, it's this big. 00:03:03.518 --> 00:03:06.431 Completely mechanical. This whole machine is mechanical. 00:03:06.431 --> 00:03:10.572 This is a picture of a prototype for part of the CPU 00:03:10.572 --> 00:03:12.711 which is in the Science Museum. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:12.711 --> 00:03:16.343 The CPU could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic -- 00:03:16.343 --> 00:03:18.796 so addition, multiplication, subtraction, division -- 00:03:18.796 --> 00:03:21.804 which already is a bit of a feat in metal, 00:03:21.804 --> 00:03:24.433 but it could also do something that a computer does 00:03:24.433 --> 00:03:26.132 and a calculator doesn't: 00:03:26.132 --> 00:03:30.070 this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision. 00:03:30.070 --> 00:03:32.936 It could do the "if then" for basic programmers, 00:03:32.936 --> 00:03:35.076 and that fundamentally made it into a computer. 00:03:35.076 --> 00:03:39.674 It could compute. It couldn't just calculate. It could do more. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:39.674 --> 00:03:42.355 Now, if we look at this, and we stop for a minute, 00:03:42.355 --> 00:03:44.226 and we think about chips today, we can't 00:03:44.226 --> 00:03:48.041 look inside a silicon chip. It's just so tiny. 00:03:48.041 --> 00:03:49.842 Yet if you did, you would see something 00:03:49.842 --> 00:03:51.664 very, very similar to this. 00:03:51.664 --> 00:03:54.611 There's this incredible complexity in the CPU, 00:03:54.611 --> 00:03:57.303 and this incredible regularity in the memory. 00:03:57.303 --> 00:03:58.965 If you've ever seen an electron microscope picture, 00:03:58.965 --> 00:04:00.934 you'll see this. This all looks the same, 00:04:00.934 --> 00:04:03.500 then there's this bit over here which is incredibly complicated. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:03.500 --> 00:04:07.483 All this cog wheel mechanism here is doing is what a computer does, 00:04:07.483 --> 00:04:09.576 but of course you need to program this thing, and of course, 00:04:09.576 --> 00:04:12.601 Babbage used the technology of the day 00:04:12.601 --> 00:04:16.247 and the technology that would reappear in the '50s, '60s and '70s, 00:04:16.247 --> 00:04:19.116 which is punch cards. This thing over here 00:04:19.116 --> 00:04:21.940 is one of three punch card readers in here, 00:04:21.940 --> 00:04:25.620 and this is a program in the Science Museum, just 00:04:25.620 --> 00:04:30.013 not far from here, created by Charles Babbage, 00:04:30.013 --> 00:04:31.881 that is sitting there — you can go see it — 00:04:31.881 --> 00:04:34.322 waiting for the machine to be built. 00:04:34.322 --> 00:04:37.742 And there's not just one of these, there's many of them. 00:04:37.742 --> 00:04:40.832 He prepared programs anticipating this would happen. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:40.832 --> 00:04:42.805 Now, the reason they used punch cards was that Jacquard, 00:04:42.805 --> 00:04:44.977 in France, had created the Jacquard loom, 00:04:44.977 --> 00:04:47.655 which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards, 00:04:47.655 --> 00:04:50.287 so he was just repurposing the technology of the day, 00:04:50.287 --> 00:04:52.392 and like everything else he did, he's using the technology 00:04:52.392 --> 00:04:57.139 of his era, so 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, cogs, steam, 00:04:57.139 --> 00:05:01.077 mechanical devices. Ironically, born the same year 00:05:01.077 --> 00:05:03.249 as Charles Babbage was Michael Faraday, 00:05:03.249 --> 00:05:05.926 who would completely revolutionize everything 00:05:05.926 --> 00:05:08.439 with the dynamo, transformers, all these sorts of things. 00:05:08.439 --> 00:05:11.597 Babbage, of course, wanted to use proven technology, 00:05:11.597 --> 00:05:13.150 so steam and things. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:13.150 --> 00:05:14.823 Now, he needed accessories. 00:05:14.823 --> 00:05:16.495 Obviously, you've got a computer now. 00:05:16.495 --> 00:05:18.884 You've got punch cards, a CPU and memory. 00:05:18.884 --> 00:05:20.819 You need accessories you're going to come with. 00:05:20.819 --> 00:05:22.447 You're not just going to have that, NOTE Paragraph 00:05:22.447 --> 00:05:25.275 So, first of all, you had sound. You had a bell, 00:05:25.275 --> 00:05:27.429 so if anything went wrong — (Laughter) — 00:05:27.429 --> 00:05:29.774 or the machine needed the attendant to come to it, 00:05:29.774 --> 00:05:31.744 there was a bell it could ring. (Laughter) 00:05:31.744 --> 00:05:33.280 And there's actually an instruction on the punch card 00:05:33.280 --> 00:05:36.182 which says "Ring the bell." So you can imagine this "Ting!" 00:05:36.182 --> 00:05:38.382 You know, just stop for a moment, imagine all those noises, 00:05:38.382 --> 00:05:39.463 this thing, "Click, clack click click click," 00:05:39.463 --> 00:05:42.400 steam engine, "Ding," right? (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:05:42.400 --> 00:05:44.835 You also need a printer, obviously, and everyone needs a printer. 00:05:44.835 --> 00:05:47.843 This is actually a picture of the printing mechanism for 00:05:47.843 --> 00:05:50.326 another machine of his, called the Difference Engine No. 2, 00:05:50.326 --> 00:05:52.261 which he never built, but which the Science Museum 00:05:52.261 --> 00:05:54.432 did build in the '80s and '90s. 00:05:54.432 --> 00:05:56.707 It's completely mechanical, again, a printer. 00:05:56.707 --> 00:05:59.405 It prints just numbers, because he was obsessed with numbers, 00:05:59.405 --> 00:06:02.922 but it does print onto paper, and it even does word wrapping, 00:06:02.922 --> 00:06:05.694 so if you get to the end of the line, it goes around like that. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:05.694 --> 00:06:07.344 You also need graphics, right? 00:06:07.344 --> 00:06:08.900 I mean, if you're going to do anything with graphics, 00:06:08.900 --> 00:06:11.496 so he said, "Well, I need a plotter. I've got a big piece of paper 00:06:11.496 --> 00:06:13.604 and an ink pen and I'll make it plot." 00:06:13.604 --> 00:06:15.434 So he designed a plotter as well, 00:06:15.434 --> 00:06:19.359 and, you know, at that point, I think he got pretty much 00:06:19.359 --> 00:06:20.890 a pretty good machine. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:20.890 --> 00:06:23.580 Along comes this woman, Ada Lovelace. 00:06:23.580 --> 00:06:26.301 Now, imagine these soirees, all these great and good comes along. 00:06:26.301 --> 00:06:29.393 This lady is the daughter of the mad, bad 00:06:29.393 --> 00:06:31.815 and dangerous-to-know Lord Byron, 00:06:31.815 --> 00:06:34.335 and her mother, being a bit worried that she might have 00:06:34.335 --> 00:06:37.192 inherited some of Lord Byron's madness and badness, 00:06:37.192 --> 00:06:40.430 thought, "I know the solution: Mathematics is the solution. 00:06:40.430 --> 00:06:43.379 We'll teach her mathematics. That'll calm her down." 00:06:43.379 --> 00:06:47.135 (Laughter) Because of course, 00:06:47.135 --> 00:06:51.050 there's never been a mathematician that's gone crazy, 00:06:51.050 --> 00:06:53.451 so, you know, that'll be fine. (Laughter) 00:06:53.451 --> 00:06:56.789 Everything'll be fine. So she's got this mathematical training, 00:06:56.789 --> 00:06:59.527 and she goes to one of these soirees with her mother, 00:06:59.527 --> 00:07:02.317 and Charles Babbage, you know, gets out his machine. 00:07:02.317 --> 00:07:04.151 The Duke of Wellington is there, you know, 00:07:04.151 --> 00:07:05.723 get out the machine, obviously demonstrates it, 00:07:05.723 --> 00:07:09.474 and she gets it. She's the only person in his lifetime, really, 00:07:09.474 --> 00:07:10.766 who said, "I understand what this does, 00:07:10.766 --> 00:07:12.973 and I understand the future of this machine." 00:07:12.973 --> 00:07:16.060 And we owe to her an enormous amount because we know 00:07:16.060 --> 00:07:19.037 a lot about the machine that Babbage was intending to build 00:07:19.037 --> 00:07:20.640 because of her. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:20.640 --> 00:07:23.397 Now, some people call her the first programmer. 00:07:23.397 --> 00:07:26.783 This is actually from one of -- the paper that she translated. 00:07:26.783 --> 00:07:29.694 This is a program written in a particular style. 00:07:29.694 --> 00:07:33.263 It's not, historically, totally accurate that she's the first programmer, 00:07:33.263 --> 00:07:35.316 and actually, she did something more amazing. 00:07:35.316 --> 00:07:36.886 Rather than just being a programmer, 00:07:36.886 --> 00:07:39.058 she saw something that Babbage didn't. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:39.058 --> 00:07:42.242 Babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics. 00:07:42.242 --> 00:07:46.191 He was building a machine to do mathematics, 00:07:46.191 --> 00:07:49.450 and Lovelace said, "You could do more than mathematics 00:07:49.450 --> 00:07:52.285 on this machine." And just as you do, 00:07:52.285 --> 00:07:53.910 everyone in this room already's got a computer on them 00:07:53.910 --> 00:07:55.964 right now, because they've got a phone. 00:07:55.964 --> 00:07:58.192 If you go into that phone, every single thing in that phone 00:07:58.192 --> 00:08:00.207 or computer or any other computing device 00:08:00.207 --> 00:08:02.288 is mathematics. It's all numbers at the bottom. 00:08:02.288 --> 00:08:06.981 Whether it's video or text or music or voice, it's all numbers, 00:08:06.981 --> 00:08:10.961 it's all, underlying it, mathematical functions happening, 00:08:10.961 --> 00:08:13.066 and Lovelace said, "Just because you're doing 00:08:13.066 --> 00:08:16.388 mathematical functions and symbols 00:08:16.388 --> 00:08:18.635 doesn't mean these things can't represent 00:08:18.635 --> 00:08:21.988 other things in the real world, such as music." 00:08:21.988 --> 00:08:24.722 This was a huge leap, because Babbage is there saying, 00:08:24.722 --> 00:08:26.944 "We could compute these amazing functions and print out 00:08:26.944 --> 00:08:30.612 tables of numbers and draw graphs," — (Laughter) — 00:08:30.612 --> 00:08:32.508 and Lovelace is there and she says, "Look, 00:08:32.508 --> 00:08:34.984 this thing could even compose music if you 00:08:34.984 --> 00:08:38.532 told it a representation of music numerically." 00:08:38.532 --> 00:08:40.101 So this is what I call Lovelace's Leap. 00:08:40.101 --> 00:08:43.838 When you say she's a programmer, she did do some, 00:08:43.838 --> 00:08:46.975 but the real thing is to have said the future is going to be 00:08:46.975 --> 00:08:49.171 much, much more than this. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:49.171 --> 00:08:51.350 Now, a hundred years later, this guy comes along, 00:08:51.350 --> 00:08:56.803 Alan Turing, and in 1936, and invents the computer all over again. 00:08:56.803 --> 00:08:59.380 Now, of course, Babbage's machine was entirely mechanical. 00:08:59.380 --> 00:09:01.911 Turing's machine was entirely theoretical. 00:09:01.911 --> 00:09:04.702 Both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective, 00:09:04.702 --> 00:09:07.255 but Turing told us something very important. 00:09:07.255 --> 00:09:10.190 He laid down the mathematical foundations 00:09:10.190 --> 00:09:12.303 for computer science, and said, 00:09:12.303 --> 00:09:15.490 "It doesn't matter how you make a computer." 00:09:15.490 --> 00:09:17.368 It doesn't matter if your computer's mechanical, 00:09:17.368 --> 00:09:21.778 like Babbage's was, or electronic, like computers are today, 00:09:21.778 --> 00:09:24.582 or perhaps in the future, cells, or, again, 00:09:24.582 --> 00:09:27.728 mechanical again, once we get into nanotechnology. 00:09:27.728 --> 00:09:29.765 We could go back to Babbage's machine 00:09:29.765 --> 00:09:32.341 and just make it tiny. All those things are computers. 00:09:32.341 --> 00:09:33.973 There is in a sense a computing essence. 00:09:33.973 --> 00:09:35.978 This is called the Church–Turing thesis. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:35.978 --> 00:09:38.645 And so suddenly, you get this link where you say 00:09:38.645 --> 00:09:40.868 this thing Babbage had built really was a computer. 00:09:40.868 --> 00:09:43.693 In fact, it was capable of doing everything we do today 00:09:43.693 --> 00:09:48.525 with computers, only really slowly. (Laughter) 00:09:48.525 --> 00:09:50.631 To give you an idea of how slowly, 00:09:50.631 --> 00:09:54.470 it had about 1k of memory. 00:09:54.470 --> 00:09:57.388 It used punch cards, which were being fed in, 00:09:57.388 --> 00:10:03.148 and it ran about 10,000 times slower the first ZX81. 00:10:03.148 --> 00:10:04.751 It did have a RAM pack. 00:10:04.751 --> 00:10:07.930 You could add on a lot of extra memory if you wanted to. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:07.930 --> 00:10:10.256 (Laughter) So, where does that bring us today? 00:10:10.256 --> 00:10:11.864 So there are plans. 00:10:11.864 --> 00:10:14.797 Over in Swindon, the Science Museum archives, 00:10:14.797 --> 00:10:16.491 there are hundreds of plans and thousands of pages 00:10:16.491 --> 00:10:19.960 of notes written by Charles Babbage about this analytical engine. 00:10:19.960 --> 00:10:23.921 One of those is a set of plans that we call Plan 28, 00:10:23.921 --> 00:10:26.075 and that is also the name of a charity that I started 00:10:26.075 --> 00:10:28.809 with Doron Swade, who was the curator of computing 00:10:28.809 --> 00:10:31.048 at the Science Museum, and also the person who drove 00:10:31.048 --> 00:10:32.478 the project to build a difference engine, 00:10:32.478 --> 00:10:35.036 and our plan is to build it. 00:10:35.036 --> 00:10:38.902 Here in South Kensington, we will build the analytical engine. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:38.902 --> 00:10:40.904 The project has a number of parts to it. 00:10:40.904 --> 00:10:43.424 One was the scanning of Babbage's archive. 00:10:43.424 --> 00:10:45.346 That's been done. The second is now the study 00:10:45.346 --> 00:10:48.456 of all of those plans to determine what to build. 00:10:48.456 --> 00:10:52.900 The third part is a computer simulation of that machine, 00:10:52.900 --> 00:10:55.823 and the last part is to physically build it at the Science Museum. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:55.823 --> 00:10:58.399 When it's built, you'll finally be able to understand how a computer works, 00:10:58.399 --> 00:11:00.233 because rather than having a tiny chip in front of you, 00:11:00.233 --> 00:11:02.843 you've got to look at this humongous thing and say, "Ah, 00:11:02.843 --> 00:11:06.178 I see the memory operating, I see the CPU operating, 00:11:06.178 --> 00:11:10.045 I hear it operating. I probably smell it operating." (Laughter) 00:11:10.045 --> 00:11:12.644 But in between that we're going to do a simulation. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:12.644 --> 00:11:14.401 Babbage himself wrote, he said, 00:11:14.401 --> 00:11:16.019 as soon as the analytical engine exists, 00:11:16.019 --> 00:11:19.723 it will surely guide the future course of science. 00:11:19.723 --> 00:11:21.568 Of course, he never built it, because he was always fiddling 00:11:21.568 --> 00:11:23.650 with new plans, but when it did get built, of course, 00:11:23.650 --> 00:11:27.160 in the 1940s, everything changed. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:27.160 --> 00:11:28.983 Now, I'll just give you a little taste of what it looks like 00:11:28.983 --> 00:11:31.616 in motion with a video which shows 00:11:31.616 --> 00:11:36.210 just one part of the CPU mechanism working. 00:11:39.210 --> 00:11:42.209 So this is just three sets of cogs, 00:11:42.209 --> 00:11:45.031 and it's going to add. This is the adding mechanism 00:11:45.031 --> 00:11:47.688 in action, so you imagine this gigantic machine. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:47.688 --> 00:11:48.847 So, give me five years. 00:11:48.847 --> 00:11:51.191 Before the 2030s happen, we'll have it. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:51.191 --> 00:11:54.161 Thank you very much. (Applause)