TV REVIEW : The Computer Saga: Letting the Chips Fall
When University of Pennsylvania researchers unveiled ENIAC, a room full of vacuum tubes and other components assembled into the first electronic computer shortly after World War II, the world was not impressed.
Experts predicted that the United States might eventually need no more than six of the huge computers, mostly to chart tides and to perform other such repetitive, mind-numbing tasks.
Those “experts” were wrong, of course, but even the most far-sighted scientists of the 1940s did not foresee the extent to which computers would dominate virtually every facet of modern society. Children’s toys now contain more computing power than ENIAC did, and giant supercomputers are able to take their users into another world--the imaginary world of virtual reality.
Computer chips are in such unexpected tools as the kitchen blender and the carpenter’s level. There is no escaping their influence.
The fascinating story of how computers achieved this domination of modern life is told in a five-part PBS series, “The Machine That Changed the World,” debuting tonight at 9 on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, and at 8 on KVCR Channel 24.
The pace at which computers have achieved their dominance is nothing short of breathtaking. If the automobile industry had developed as fast as computers, says Gordon Moore, chairman of chip-maker Intel Corp., “the average car would travel at half a million miles per hour and get half a million miles per gallon” of gas. Furthermore, he adds, it would be cheaper to throw your Rolls-Royce away and buy a new one than to park it downtown while you are out to dinner.
The tale has a strong “They said it couldn’t be done” flavor. Critics charged that one of the 18,000 vacuum tubes in ENIAC would blow out every five seconds, rendering the machine useless. Mathematicians predicted that companies could never find enough people to carry out the complicated task of programming the computers. Administrators predicted that clerks would never accept them. All proved wrong.
One anecdote from the series appears especially appropriate in this election year. In 1952, CBS borrowed one of the first Univacs from Remington Rand to make an election-night prediction on the narrow race between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. Throughout the evening, however, announcer Charles Collingwood apparently could not get an answer from the machine.
Only after midnight did Collingwood sheepishly admit the truth. Univac had predicted an Eisenhower landslide immediately after the polls had closed, but nobody believed it.
The series closes with an ironic twist that brings the story of computers full circle. Much of the original impetus for the development of computers resulted from the fact that humans make lots of errors performing repeated calculations. The burgeoning growth of large data banks today is leading to the spread of large amounts of erroneous information that can destroy credit ratings, cause the loss of jobs and otherwise interfere with personal privacy.
But the problem is not the machines, which, as advertised, do not make errors. It is the humans entering the information who make mistakes, and in that aspect at least, society is no better off than before computers were developed.
