Lecture Week 3

Today in the lecture we started by watching a film called Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard, another French film from the same era as La Jetee. We also went through the history of technology and the computer. It was very interesting. My favourite lecture so far. Professor Stockwell started the timeline with the Ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism, then moving to Alexandria and how it was the hub of knowledge with a huge library. Unfortunately the library burnt down so the ancients lost a lot of knowledge and that became the start of the Dark Ages and the decline of Greece and Rome. The Ottoman Turks then took Constantinople and pushed through into the north of Italy, this becoming the Renaissance period. In 1400AD out of the Renaissance comes new research in science and products of science-scientific investigation. Then comes the Enlightenment Period and in 1642AD Pascal developed the Pascaline Calculator. The first person to start thinking about systematic thinking was Charles Babbage. He developed the Analytical Engine. He thought how can we think and make big calculations. One person who saw possibilities in Babbage’s machine was Ada Byron, Lord Byron’s daughter. In the mid 30s Alan Turing wrote a paper about computability of numbers which is the structure of the modern day computer.