The Machine That Changed the World: Great Brains

Awesome! Thank you! This was my FAVORITE documentary as a kid. I still have an old recording on VHS. I'd kill to get an MP3 of the title theme song.

Simply outstanding! I'm so glad you tracked the rest of them down. Really looking forward to the whole series, there are some real treats in store in the other episodes. Great work on the notes as well.

I'm so pumped to watch the first episode. Great job tracking it down! Look forward to reading your annotations/discussion of the next four episodes as well (there's some real gem material in there). Thanks!

Great post. It would be nice if, in all the credits, you gave a shout-out to the great narrator, Will Lyman. Most know him from Frontline on PBS or a million or so shows on the History Channel.

This makes me IMPOSSIBLY happy! My childhood documentary of choice! Thanks so much for finding these!

Wait a minute... Video No Longer Available?

What gives? I WAS SO EXCITED!

Can't wait for the next episode... This has to be the most comprehensive account of computing history I've ever seen... Fantastic stuff!

Remarkable. I'm hugely looking forward to the torrent; watched this as a child in the UK at almost the same time as Simon, and read the book avidly; highlights for me included seeing Englebart's work for the first time.

I miss documentaries like this (although I much preferred the UK narration, I must admit).

Brilliant and well indexed with Viddler. 7 seconds to compute Pi to 707 decimals? Try 0.189s using the arctan (read: slower) method and java 1.5 on a MacBook Pro.

Hooray! Thanks for this; very cool.

Kind of a shame that they're still claiming Mauchly and Eckert invented the first electronic digital computer when it's fairly well documented that many of their ideas were actually invented and implemented in Atanasoff and Berry's earlier computer.

Still, fun stuff!

Excellent video! Thank you so much for sharing!

thank u 4 sharing

I recently watched Bob Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds Trilogy. It's weird to witness how fast this starts to look like history.

Brilliant! Can't wait to watch - thanks so much for finding, digitising and sharing this :)

I really appreciate the time you spent getting this online however can you please enable the option to download this video from viddler.

Thanks.

非常精彩的介绍

Awesome! I really can't wait to show these to my kids (14 and 7) ... a history lesson that should have them transfixed ...

Thank you so much for bringing these back!

I started work in computers late 1963. I learnt to program the ICT 1501 (ex RCA Canada I think) the machine on which we tested our programs belonged to the London Met Police (I think) south of the Thames. About 150 instructions set. A real pig - you got so involved in the coding that you started to forget what your application was. It was a 4-bit character machine, this meant storing alpha characters as zone and numeric components. To print something you needed 6 buffers (zone & numeric for left, center, and right banks on the 120 char line printer) then you had to set a timer to figure out when the required character appeared under the print hammer. Then you had to fire the print hammer for each character on the line. While this was happeneing (a few milliseconds) you went away and did a calculation on some other part of the program - and so on. What fun - what memories!

Whoever made this could you post the whole video in a torrent file and upload it to say, demonoid, btjunkie, or isohunt. That would be great.

This is a brillant documentary! Thank you so much for sharing!

It was a delight to watch this video, thanks for the sharing!, I look forward for the torrent :-).

These are fantastic. Thanks to everyone for making these treasures available for the masses.

Sad about Turing.

So many greats, so many eccentrics.

Waiting for the high res version...

Thanks for sharing!

i have only found two parts. neither are yours.
can someone direct me to the proper torrent?
thank you.

When you make the files available, could you dump the tapes in unedited MPEG-2 format? That's higher quality than the deinterlacing you are probably going to do to squish them down into mpeg-4. MPEG-2 will preserve the interlacing, which can be used not only for a better progressive conversion but also eliminating noise and flutter.

If you need video processing advice, please feel free to email me. It is important that this historically significant documentary be properly preserved.

Dears
I am curator of computer Museum Brazil.
I love that kind of film, It is amazing.
Lets to keep that history alive.
Jose Carlos Valle
curator

Dears
I am curator of computer Museum Brazil.
I love that kind of film, It is amazing.
Lets to keep that history alive.
Jose Carlos Valle
curator

Doing some net surfing and came upon this through CNET. Since I'm a history buff, this historical movie on the computer and the thinkers behind it just made my day.
Thank you for making this important history available to the public at large.
Mark in sunny San Diego

Great work and thanks.

thanks

Thanks for the torrent.

Come on, people, we need seeders for the torrent! I've left it running all day and I haven't downloaded a single byte.

Great stuff Andy...zillion thanks from the Fiji Islands!!

Wow! Excellent. I've been looking for this for a while. Thank you! My brush with computer history was through working with a few people who were there. About 18 years ago I has a supervisor who programmed ENIAC. That is, he helped to draw circuit diagrams for programs. I also worked with a guy who worked on UNIVAC I. He told be about how ridiculously difficult it was to design and build the first tape drives.

Making these available is very helpful. Can you give an estimate of when you will post the second episode?

Thanks for finding and putting these up, just watched the first one and on the torrent now.
Gonna watch part 2 tomorrow.
Excellent find.

Thanks for making this available! I had the subsequent episodes on VHS, but I had missed taping the first one when it aired in 1992. Brilliant series.

Hi,

This is great I have pestered the BBC about this and they did not want to know me, or about the program. I have some eps on VHS but are missing 5 and 6.

Thanks again, Mark in Melbourne, Australia.

Very impressive.Thanks.

Is there a way to download and view these files offline?

This is amazing. Thanks for taking the time to dig this up and share it with all of us.

Thank you!!! I have been looking for these for eons... I could not even purchase them, as that was my original intention. PBS no longer carries this. I did happen to find the first 2 of 5 on a torrent site last year, and the second one did not even finish downloading before the torrent disapeared..

Thank you again! You have done a service to geeks everywhere.

This is one of the best documentaries I've seen and recommend it to anyone who has a sense of history--it will impact us for years to come. I hope some enterprising producer will carry on where this left off--it would make an interesting annual special for any network that gives us updates into the world of science.

Thank you ! I have been looking for this all over !

It is very interesting to konow about computer how in 40 years have changed and who were the firts people to start this technology.That was a great information.

Thanks.

I watched this on our PBS channel in 1992 when it originally aired. At the time I'm not sure if I owned a VCR yet. But I did not have the foresight to record it. Then it never aired again!
Later on I asked WGBH Boston about it and there were no plans to release it on video. I was quite upset about that.
So what you have done here is fantastic.
Last night I found your Torrent file, so I'm very happy. Thank you very much for all your time and effort on this project.
My father, who I'm sure saw this in 1992, will enjoy it again. He has been working with computers since 1962.
Thanks!

@John: I don't know if you are still reading this, since it was in June when you posted, but anyhow, I just attended a talk and slide show on ENIAC, yesterday by John Mauchly's son.

If I'm remembering yesterday's talk properly, Atanasoff and Berry's machine was not a computer in the true sense of the term, nor was it ever proven to actually work. This according to the research Mr. Mauchly did. He is very much into the history of it all, since his father was such an important figure.

Sorry, I forgot to fill in the name and email fields in my last post. But that was me!
Thanks again.

I thank you very much for this web site. For years I nursed my betamax machine and the accompanying five tapes along until the tapes themselves were almost transparent or taped ad infinitum. The machine finally failed or I just ran out of parts to keep it going. This was the one piece of video history that I constantly shared with my classes in computers until I could no longer. I have had enjoyable week watching each episode again and this website is definitely marked on my computer.

Thank you so much. I have a video from the first time it aired on PBS. Now the video is so bad I could no longer use it. I teach computer classes in a Middle School and this video is much more interesting than I am.

Everybody seems to appreciate that you save those videos from extinction.

It's should be a strong warning against content "protected" with DRM.

Is this series available on DVD? how about donwloading it?
Thanks

I really love the video it's so interesting. The first Computer!? Wow....do they have this video on DVD? I want would really love to keep this in my collection...By the way, who is the music artist for the intro and credits theme? It sounds so good!

Thank you so much for posting this! I watched these when I was a kid, and all I could remember years later was the end sequence of the robot arm disassembling the blocks and then unplugging itself. That image stuck with me but it was years before I even found the title of the program, and then of course it wasn't available. I'll really enjoy watching these again!

I just LOVE how they synchronized the germans voice with terrible English :D

Thank you so much - I've been looking for this since the early 90s!!!!