So a summary of week 3's lecture on the birth of the computer...was actually an alright lecture and I did, surprisingly, like the alphaville movie!!

• The computer has its origins in various adding machines, most notably Charles Babbage's 19th Century difference engine which was designed to calculate and print mathematic tables.
• The serious work required for the development of the computer was done by Alan Turing.
• Turing investigated programming, neural nets, and the prospects for artificial intelligence. His philosophical paper on machine intelligence Computing Machinery and Intelligence suggested the Turing Test: a human judge sits at a computer terminal and interacts with both a computer or a human by written communication only; if the judge cannot tell which is which then the machine has passed the test and it would be reasonable to call the computer intelligent.
• Computers were first commercially produced by IBM in the 1950s. The first generation of computers were large, unwieldy and expensive machines for military, government and corporate work but it quickly became apparent that computers would get smaller, quicker and less expensive at an exponential rate.
• Several computer nerds got together at regular, hobbyist 'Home Brew' meetings. They exchanged ideas and displayed their latest and greatest home-made PCs. It was in this environment that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got hooked up together and started their own little company - Apple. They produced the Apple I - a primitive machine with a single circuit board, no case and no keyboard. It sold for $USA666.60. They sold fifty of them. Their dream became to produce and sell the first self-contained PC for people who weren't techies ... for people who were more interested in the software and its possibilities, than the hardware.
• To run computers, there are two types of software required: the language and the Operating System.
• Microsoft/Bill Gates made a decision to promise an Operating System. They found and bought an Operating System which had been developed by Tim Patterson. It was called Kudos and was based heavily on Kildall's CPM. Microsoft paid Seattle Computer Products (Patterson's employer) $50,000 for it.
• Over the ensuing years, IBM gained more and more of the market share - largely through its association with the software giant Microsoft.
• Alphaville (1965) by Jean-Luc Goddard combines French new wave sensibility with a science fiction story line to produce a film noir account of a dystopia where a technocratic dictatorship has taken control. Set in the future and on another planet, there are no special effects. The film was shot in the real Paris using modernist locations to give a futurist feel. Was actually entertainment for me!!