BBC documentary history of computers part 6

This is part 6. The BBC broadcasted in 1991 the serie ‘The dream machine’. This part starts with the history of books, Canon Tiller Master of the Library Hereford Cathedral talks about the first ‘chain library’ (at least you did not have to pay a fee for books which were returned to late). Mitchell Kapor founder of Lotus talks about how frustrating it was to program an old computer (with punched cards) Robert Taylor, Computer Science Lab. Xerox talks about the frustration with these old punched cards, which students of Standford shows by a film of an very frustrated computer programmer commit suicide Sketchpad was an innovative system developed in 1963 by Ivan Sutherland as part of his PhD thesis (wiki link below), Ted Nelson author ‘Computer Lib’ comments on the introduction of this Sketchpad Further we see Douglas Engelbart who invented something which had the farmost impact on the computer as we know it today, in fact i’m using it while editing this text Xerox’s research centre in Palo Alto gathered together the brightest computer sciencetists they could find with the task to make computers easier to use (Larry Tesler of Xerox PARC comments on this as well as Alan Kay, also from Xerox). Some wifi links: en.wikipedia.org www.cadazz.com en.wikipedia.org

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