Bosslady: Polly Dear. Polly: Goodbye Joan, have a nice weekend.
[Jazzy music: 'The Russians Are Coming' - Val Bennett]
Tim: Of all the machines in the office, the computer is probably the most awe-inspiring.
But despite all the hype and jargon surrounding them,
they've now become so easy to use, that they're on almost every office desk.
This change would never have happened without word processing.
For most people, word processing is actually their only use for a computer.
It is an extraordinarily elaborate way to write something
with a separate keyboard, monitor, computer and printer.
But the ease of trying sentences out... [keyboard clatters]
and moving them about, does give writing a whole new freedom.
In this programme Rex and I are going to look at the evolution of the word processor
and at least try to demystify some of the jargon surrounding it.
The word processor came from combining the computer with a much earlier invention, the typewriter.
This is part of the Science Museum's enormous collection of typewriters.
The first attempts were unbelievably clumsy.
This is the appropriately named Pratt Teratype of 1860.
The paper goes on here, that's the maximum size on this plate.
And when you press one of the piano keys [thunk] the type pops up here.
It's unbelievably tiny.
This is an early typewriter made by Charles Wheatstone
[clunk] [clunk] [clunk]
This one looks a bit like an old Primus stove, it actually still works quite well.
[clunks and cogs clicking]
Now this one, you put the paper in this brass flame...frame with a bit of carbon over it.
And then you put the writing ball down on top of it,
And you punch in the letters, and their supposed to spring back out again. [punching of letters]
Press the keys, while the frame moves under it.
And er, this one's a sort of early version of a golf ball.
[punching and clicking noises]
But this machine, the Sholes and Gliddon from 1875, revolutionised the typewriter.
This was the first one where you could type faster than you could write by hand.
It was the first machine to be mass produced,
and the first machine to have the QWERTY layout of the keys that's been used ever since.
His machine appeared just at the time that offices were expanding rapidly.
By 1900, typewriters had become an established part of any office.
Introducing a whole new workforce of women.
Man: Miss Smith, what can you tell us about your model B?
Smith: Right now, I wouldn't trade my typewriter for the world.
The new improvements to typewriter ribbons, and the new
proportional spacing of my model B, our business letters appear so elegant.
And I've even increased my typing speed too.
One thing though, I wish they'd invent a typewriter that could erase or eliminate errors.
I'd never have to stop to erase again.
Well, maybe someday.
Tim: Word processors remove this problem, because before everything's finally committed
to paper, it's stored in a form that's easy to modify and manipulate, in electrical circuits.
[scraping of plastic]
If you're opening a machine up, there's no obvious key to how it does this.
It just reveals a maze of intricate circuits and a collection of inscrutable silicon chips.
And tiny, even more complicated mazes of minute circuits
It's sort of worlds within worlds.
However, all these tiny circuits are really just vast collections of transistors.
Just like this.
Though all each transistor does,
I'll just put it in this holder here...
Is to switch the electric current on and off.
In theory an entire computer could be made from enough transistor circuits like this.
This computer board's all still connected up.
And if I pause it for a minute.
At any instant, every single transistor in the chip is either fully on, or fully off.
Everything that's fed into the computer has to be converted to a form
that can be handled by the on/off language of the chips.
Word processing uses a code called ASCII.
The letters of the alphabet are converted to 7 bits, that can each be on or off.
So if I type a letter 'A'.
That's on, off, off, off, off, on, on.
'B', the different one.
'C', 'D', 'E'. Each letter of the alphabet lights a different combination.
And capital letters turn this bit off.
[keys click]
The idea of coding things in a digital way like this
started long before the age of computers.
[steam train puffs and hoots]
Conductor: Have your tickets ready. All tickets please!
Well hey ma'am, may I see your ticket? Woman: Yeah, sure.
Tim: These tickets, called punch photographs, had lists
which were punched out when the ticket was bought.
Conductor: All seems to match in here...
Tim: Each space on the ticket could be punched, or not punched: A primitive digital code.
Conductor: I like what I see! Have a nice day. Woman: Oh! *titters* Well, why thank you.
Conductor: Hey, You! Suspicious looking character! Gimme your ticket.
Man: Sure!
Tim: The punched photograph was a futile attempt to deter train robbers.
Conductor: This don't match up! We have, have a robber! On the train!
Conductor: Oh No! Man: *evil chuckle*
Conductor Okay everyone, don't panic, just, just get out of here! [cackling continues]
Man: Hahahaha. This is my Lucky Day!
Tim: An inventor called Herman Hollerith adapted the cards to record
numbers and letters of the alphabet for the US census count of 1890
[clunking of keys] Hollerith's machine became widely adopted in offices.
The holes in the card formed digital codes, similar to the ASCII codes in a computer.
[motor and fluttering paper]
However, Hollerith machines could only sort and count things.
The unique advantage of a computer is that it can perform an infinite variety of processes.
Instead of the fixed mechanisms in the Hollerith machines
computer circuits can be given infinitely variable coded instructions.
The computer program.
Tim: Computer programs are also written in codes of on off bits.
While the computer's working, both the program and the data, [tapping noise]
the letters you type, are stored inside chips called the computer's RAM.
Or Random Access Memory.
A chip like this, can store 64,000 bits.
Everytime you switch the computer off, all the bits inside here are lost.
So, err to save things more permanently, they're recorded on magnetic disks.
The coating of these disks is just the same as, er, audio or video tape.
And the codes are recorded as minute bits of magnetism.
With a solution of iron powder, you can actually see the magnetised parts of the disk.
Each of these tracks can actually hold 72,000 on/off bits.
Hard disks are the same idea, but they can store literally thousands of millions of bits.
They're so sensitive they have to be sealed up inside the computer.
[harddrive whirrs] And these heads, which record and play back
the information are so close to the disk that they do occasionally collide with it.
That's the origin of the computer 'crash'.
Boss: Terry's gerbil has GOT to go. [beep beep]
If I could only find that memo about...
Tim: Although the contents of the RAM and the disks are referred [tapping of keys]
to as the computer's memory, it should really be called storage.
Boss: Maybe Brenda remembers?
Brendaaa! When was that memo sent round about pets in the office?
Tim: The computer simply stores everything, whether it is useful or not.
The clever part of human memory is really the forgetting bit. [typing and beeping]
Our brains are constantly selecting what's worth remembering.
Brenda: Oh, no wait, wasn't that the same day I met Bruce the fire officer?
*giggle* He was a pet and no mistake! Yes! [typing and beeping]
Brenda: There it is!
Boss: Splendid. Thank you Brenda.
[music]
Voiceover: The world's fastest mechanical brain!
Tim: Misleading descriptions of computers stem from the 1950s.
When they were often referred to as giant brains.
Voiceover: This indicator acts as the main control.
[music]
Tape is fed in, tape that contains great masses of numerical data.
The machine follows many of the patterns of man's own mind.
Only, the machine never goes in for daydreaming!
[satisfying clunk] Tim: In reality, these early computers were extraordinarily clumsy.
This is a 1958 Pegasus, recently restored by the Computer Conservation Society.
Instead of chips, it all works with valves.
Man: ...1800 of them, and they're all mounted on packages. [aircon noise throughout]
And here's an example of a package from Pegasus.
Three valves, old components,
Tim: And so, er, it's like a sort of primitive printed circuit?
Man: Yes, this is an early form of printed circuit.
Tim: To keep the valves cool, large amounts of air have to be blown through the computer.
So it all has to be aerodynamically shaped, like a wind tunnel.
Man: And what we have to first of all, is to switch the HT on.
And we press the HT button here,
and that brings up the lines on the cathode ray tube here.
And now we have to enter the instructions to start the engineer's test program.
This is looking at the internal registers in the machine.
And each of those little spikes there is an on/off bit, within one register.
Tim: So down is on, and up is off and up is on?
Man: That's right, yes.
And of course you can also hear the engineer's test program, [clicking]
playing on the loudspeaker down here. [regularly clicking]
And having got a loudspeaker there was an incentive for people to write tunes for the computer.
And I can now load a tunes program in.
And we have to load it, it's on a paper tape reader here.
And here's the tunes program punched on paper tape.
And this we can load into Pegasus.
And here we have the punched paper tape
Tim: So the holes are just like the holes in Hollerith punch cards? Man: That's right. Yes. Yes.
So if we load that into the reader here...
And then we start the program running...
[crunching noise] And that's now loading the paper tape in.
[slower clunking]
Now if we load the music program,
and now we can start the tunes program running. [crude electronic music]
And now you can see the bit patterns there on the screen. Tim: Of the individual notes? Yeah.
[music continues]
Tim: Writing programs on paper tape like this was very difficult.
You didn't actually have to punch every individual hole.
Instead you used modified teletape machines like this.
[very loud motor noise]
Tim: Each letter I press... [clunking of punches over motor noise]
punches out a different combination of holes.
Even so, it remains a very frustrating business,
because just one wrong key,
And when the tape's transferred to the computer, the program won't run.
As part of my engineering degree I did a short computer course.
Writing programs like this in 1970.
And I don't ever remember getting a single program to run.
The solution was to add a TV screen to the computer.
This is one of the first computers to have one built in.
It was introduced in 1969.
And then with a special program called a 'line editor'.
You put, ran this through the machine first.
You could then write your own program, see what you were doing
and make adjustments, and try it out as you went along.
These line editor programs were really the forerunner of the modern word processor programs.
Man: I suppose that some of you are wondering what that television screen device is,
And what it has to do with the office of today?
That equipment is called the IBM 3277 display terminal. [typing on keyboard]
Through its keyboard, characters are typed and displayed on the screen.
Should the operator make an error, the backspace key works
just like an eraser on a pencil and the error disappears.
Tim: Displaying everything like this needed a lot of circuitry.
What made it practical was to miniaturise it all.
Combining the transistors in the first integrated circuits or silicon chips.
At first these were relatively simple.
This is an example. If I put one light in the output, and two in the input,
I can show you what it does.
This is a comparing circuit.
It switches the output on whenever the two inputs are the same as each other.
Either both off, or both on.
It switches the output off when only one input is lit.
Even the simple comparing circuit can start to seem clever if it's working fast enough.
I can put in one set of inputs, the ASCII code for a letter 'a',
and compare it with the other set.
The output will only switch on if the other set is another 'a'.
If I was to do this enough times, I could compare whole words.
And this is the basis of sophisticated word processor spell checkers.
Comparing words that you've typed in, with words that are stored in the computer's memory.
This clock I made works entirely with these simple sorts of chips.
You tell the time, the hours with the number of balls here.
And the minutes by the amount of sand that's come through the hourglass.
The chips are inside the high priest's casket.
It's a sort of box of mysteries...
I usually decorate my circuits with tiny people.
I the idea of a sort of secret world which they're all keeping going.
I use this clip-on meter to see what's actually going on inside the chips.
That one's counting the seconds.
Err. This one's sort of storing, various holding circuits, storing the current time.
Well although I've had quite a lot of trouble keeping the, erm,
getting the mechanisms to work reliably, none of the chips have ever gone wrong.
[chime of bell and rattle of mechanism]
[gong chimes]
It's the extraordinary reliability of chips that's made it possible
build them more and more complicated.
The modern microprocessor chip is almost a complete computer in itself.
It controls all the other chips inside the computer.
But although it's very complex, it's still built up of thousands of transistor switching circuits.
And it works by doing a lot of very simple things extremely quickly.
Erm, we've soldered a whole lot of lights onto this microprocessor.
And er, if I insert this one...
Switch the computer on. [beep]
I've now rigged this one up so that I can slow it down,
and you can now actually see the bits of code moving around inside.
These are either the coded letters or the instructions of what to do with them.
Of course in reality, this is actually switching at millions of times a second.
Word processors could have remained highly expensive rarities.
Except for the dedicated hobbyists, who started devising and selling personal computer kits,
made from microprocessor chips.
[falling] Voiceover: The Amstrad....
Tim: By the early '80s, companies like Sinclair and Amstrad
had started to sell ready-built personal computers.
Many came complete with their own word processor programs.
Voiceover: ...and inclusive word processing software, ["Intel inside"-style music]
it's more than a word processor, for less than most typewriters. [boing *smash!*]
Tim: The last part of the word processor to be perfected was the printer.
The first sort to appear were dot-matrix printers.
These have a memory which stores the shape of each letter, in patterns of ons and offs.
Then, inside the machine, there's a device like this.
The ons and offs are used to power a group of electromagnets.
Which push out a tiny row of steel pins.
[dot matrix noise]
It's funny really though, to have all this high tech equipment
to produce something that looks considerably worse than ordinary typing.
The next sort of printer to be developed was the daisy wheel.
This has a plastic wheel with the actual type on, a bit like a typewriter.
This is fixed to an electric motor that rotates the wheel,
with a sensor on the back to stop it in precisely the right place.
And then there's simply a hammer, which is fixed to an electromagnet,
to hammer the type onto the page.
[quiet tapping noise]
Man: Oh, seen this one Miss M?
Boss: You Must be joking? You call this scrawl a job application?
*sigh* I won't be interviewing him either!
We'll have to readvertise.
Coffee break I think. "Hmm..." "Right."
Tim: The daisy wheel was a marketing breakthrough.
For the first time, anybody could write a professional looking letter.
Boy: Come in and try one! Yeah, I might!
[typing and beeping] I could go for that!
Wicked!
Boss: This man looks *very* Good. Don't you love the name? [murmurs of agreement]
Boss: We'll see him. [murmurs of agreement]
All: YOU?!
Boss: You're Ponsonby Smythe!? How dare you! "Wasting our time!" "Outragous!"
[*splat*] Tim: The success of the daisy wheel led to the
development of much faster and quieter printers.
These have returned to the idea of creating the letters
out of patterns of dots like the pin matrix printers.
Some are laser printers which are quite complicated.
But others simply squirt blobs of ink.
Although our home made version is a bit crude,
inkjet printers can actually squirt very tiny drops of ink with great accuracy.
This is an actual print head.
The computer powers tiny electric heating elements
which create bubbles and force ink out through these tiny holes.
[inkjet noise]
The drops are so small, they can form almost any style of type.
But although computers are getting more and more sophisticated,
the reality is usually rather less glamorous.
Brenda: If you'd like to come this way sir...
[knock knock] This is Miss Mathias, our head of department.
Greed: Hello, I'm Osburt Greed from head office. Here to ascertain whether your
good self and subordinates are fully cognisant with every aspect of computer usage.
Boss: I, I think I follow you. Of course we all find our PCs absolutely, erm...
Greed: Kindly demonstrate...
Brenda: Oooh, erm, yes. I'll network everyone in the department to confirm current status. [typing and beeping]
Brenda: Oh Mr Jones, put them manuals away!
Brenda: Joan! Don't use that old thing!
Joan: Sorry. Brenda: Pretend you understand the new one!
Brenda: Oh No! Brian's got his shoes off! And where's his computer?
Brenda: Brian! Get it out!
...I mean your computer! You shouldn't be writing letters by hand.
Brenda: Oh Polly! You're being networked. You must confirm your current status!
Polly: But I'm so bored! [computer bleeps]
[game noises] Brenda: Terry! You'll get us all into trouble.
We're being inspected to see if we're computer literate!
Greed: Hmmm. The conclusions of my investigations, will be issued subsequently in triplicate to this department.
*wibble* *sigh*
Tim: The new computer users are completely helpless if something goes wrong.
Everyone has stories of floppy disks introducing rogue instructions or viruses.
[sinister computer noise]
[computer game noises]
In reality, catastrophic events are rare, much the most common problems are
loose connections or coffee in the keyboard.
The sheer complexity of the software though, does lead to idiosyncrasies.
Mine has a habit of occasionally freezing up so that
whatever I type, whatever keys I type none of them do anything.
The only way to sort it out is to switch the computer off and then switch it on again.
And then I lose everything that I've typed in the last few minutes.
Personally, I find this reassuring, it reminds me that my word processor
is just a useful gadget full of transistor switches.
Not some super-human intelligence.
[Jazzy music: 'Take 5' - Dave Brubeck]