#fk1_1
[00:00 - 09:39]
intro – apologies re: language
[09:39]
first thought:
you’re not able to understand what happens to you if you don’t understand some aspects of electronics, electricity. you must understand switches in order to turn on lights, etc. newspapers are only interested in the stocks and shares – what’s going on inside nobody cares about
[11:09]
second thought:
sometimes the impression that americans think they are brilliant, having discovered all electronics. early 19th century end of WWII – is a European history, with exceptions like Thomas Alva Edison.
[12:32]
Open source, open networks, open hardware, open wetware… The reason for the closure – internal memos (Bill Gates, verbatim: “in the future we treat consumers just as computers – both are programmable”)
[14:02]
The problem is to keep you on the run Can’t explain everything in the software and hardware
Helpful fact – the engineers are not helpful, they are sad
Engineers make up poetical terms – electrics to electronics – the flip / flop – self explaining its function
When I spoke about this very classroom – switch lamps laptops beamer
[16:44]
The real thing -
When we talk about science we’re bound to speak greek – epsiteme of science – when we say electricity in which language do we use? Obviously greek
Electrum as an adjective means brilliant – as a noun it is amber (amber found in the Baltic sea down to southern Greece). If you rub amber it sparks – which are electric sparks. The Greeks may have been talking about frictional electricity.
#fk1_2
[00:00]
Two proper names are connected to electron -
Helios – Epithethon of the god of the sun, the brilliant one
Elektra – Sophoclese’s story of the daughter of Agamemnon
[01:19]
Electricity and electromagnetism
Question of the origin of magnetism – Magnesia, a city in asian minor where magnetic iron finds have been made
One of the papers we recommend: Lighting and Thunder – Lightning and Series – Event and Thunder
Why do we refer to the Greeks when we talk about science and technology -
Hegel (Philosophy of World History): The Serians or the Jews of the Egyptians – had interest in monstrous or unnatural events and wonders. The unique fact about the ancient Greeks is that they wondered about the natural. What is amber? What is an echo? What the lights over the mediterranean sea
[05:18]
The Greeks understood the atomism and physicality – but had no electrical
Focus on the natural – to quote Julain the Apostate. Arithmetics the Greeks took over from Phoenecians / Geometry from the Egyptians / and Astronomy from the Bablylonian. The Greeks took up these three sciences with their Music to make the 4 sciences.
[11:20]
The idea of elements, atoms was a Greek invention, and links to the Greek alphabet.
University of Wisconsin -Powerl – 1991 – thesis that … Greeks took over the letters of other languages and changed it into consonance and vowels. This was an atomic language – transfering the linguistic units into the units of other aspects of physic.
Transference of phonetic units into other units – the atom, the water / fire / air and earth, etc.
[16:00]
Middle Ages – not so untechnical (Lynn Ridegork american historian)
Chinese troops – enemies in the north the Mongols – brought trouble over and over
Chinese armies were not entheusiastic about fighting in the desert – outside of the imperial war.
Magnetic iron with them was used to to figure out direction home – the compass
13th century – compasses were used for maritime orientation in Europe – opening the infinite Atlantic Ocean, and so America in its columbian perspective – a product of this technology -
Holderlin – the half of the sea
#fk1_3
[00:00]
European myth – the appearance of the compass – Flavio Amalfi (town in southern Italy)
1543 – somebody in the german town Neuremberg made the remark that the magnet compass needle had two opposite poles. since 50 years before this statement the algebraic signs of + and – had been introduced into mathematics.
[03:05 EDIT (?) - THERE IS A SKIP]
William Gilbert – published 1600 – magnets have been magnetised by our planet which is a mother magnet. we live already ever in a big magnetic field
[04:45]
Leaving magnetism… Electricity
The amber, rubbed by “little greek fingers.” electricity was transferred into the Leyden Bottle, invented in this University city. Henrich vonGleiss – tin foil – tantamount to the amber stone, but worked better. And you could have electricity wherever you wanted (didn’t have to go to the Baltic sea to get amber). Electricity was technicized.
The Leyden Bottle then transforms itself into the capacitor… Faraday, the symbol of the capacitor.
Galvani had the idea to connect the Leyden Bottle to the legs of dead frogs. When he did so, they moved. Electricity was therefore an animatic phenomenon. For 100 or 200 years, that there was an “animal electricity.” Galvanic coupling is the direct connection of two electric voltages/current.
Spanish experiment – an electrical telegraphy from Barcelona to harbour city of Mataro. Constructed some 30 Leyden bottles representing the letters and cyphers of the spanish-latin alphabet – 30km – at the end of the wires was a single person, a man, holding the wire in his or her hand – how many shrieks corresponded to the telegraphic message (“kittler”)
#fk1_4
[00:00]
In 1804 – italian refrutted Galvani’s hypothesis
The fashionable character of the “animal electricity” – coming from Austria going to Paris – Franz Andro Mezmer was very popular in mundane circles of the French court. Animal Electricity was used to form circles of people holding hands inspired by “hysterics.” Electricity enters the realm of popular culture in the 18th Century.
This popularity ends with Alessandro Volta. Invented the battery. Applied principles of French chemistry (Lavosier and other great scientists of the French Revolution) to practical purposes. Lavosier founded the modern concept of elements (nitrogen, oxygen, etc.), dispelling the Greek idea of fire, water, etc., as the elements. Water is tantamount to H20 – parts of hydrogen and oxygen.
Inspired by Lavosier, Volta produced “elements” of electricity – + and -. Electricity, DC flow, was available without this in the form of Leyden bottles. (Italy was part of the Napoleanic empire at this time – Napoleon honoured Volta for his invention)
After the King had been decaptitated, the French Revolution stood before the big question, “whos in charge now.” Jean Jacques Rousseau – the general assembly. Openents said that this idea is feasible in small Cantons (where Rousseau was born), but France is a big territory, so how can we inform ourselves about these votes, etc., fast enough? Up to now information is transported via horses. Optical telegraphy – little houses like windmills were put up some 15 or 10 miles from one another, relay stations, where optical signals standing for letters and numbers were transmitted. The city of Lile victory was transmitted to Paris in 20 minutes via optical telegraphy.
The German scientist and physician…
[10:55 Glass of Water - perhaps a break]
[11:06]
The optical telegraphy was very expensive to enact, but was part of the rhetoric of democracy (that we could “all take part” in optical telegraphy). The fact was that Napoleon’s army was the sole benefactor of the optical telegraphy – Napoleon’s big advantage over the enemy.
In 1809 the empire of Austria for the first time decided to attack Napoleon – but the Austrians didn’t know about optical telegraphy, so they expected countermeasures in 4 weeks, but was able to retaliate in one week
[13:42]
The questions of realtime in modern electricity – the problems we have now
[14:00]
The German scientist and physician… replacing the optical telegraphy by an electrical one. 35 cables stood fr the letters and cyphers of the german alphabet, went into little vessels where electricity was dissolved into oxygen and hydrogen.
Inspired by Immanuel Kant – optimization of the optical telegraphy and replace it by electrical one.
Emperor said, “Un idee Germanique” – A German Idea, a crazy idea, and idea not to implemented by the empire.
[16:18]
American and Britain were in incredibly bad relations… so an American came to Paris to propose the steam boat for a French invasion of the British Empire. Wait until there was no wind, and then attack the British – this offer was declined.
[17:52]
As thing start to hit and to fit, pieces come together,
Oerstedt – danish – the element aluminium, inspired by Kant and German idealism – made a crucial experiment. He travelled through Germany to visit with Ritter… Ritter suggested to Oerstedt that magnetism and electricity must contain certain relations. Both phenomenon have + and – family relationships.
#fk1_5
[00:00]
Ritter suggested to Oerstedt that magnetism and electricity must contain certain relations. Both phenomenon have + and – family relationships.
This idea of positive of and negative was further polarised by German idealism.
Oerstedt – switched on current inside a coil, and then attracted the iron filings, but this is only happened at the moment of switching – i.e.: current changing in the wire.
[03:28 Break return]
Michael Faraday – autodidactic inventor inverted Oerstedt’s approach. He discovered the stroboscopic effect (essential to moving images, etc.).
Faraday discovered that movement of a magnet creates alternating current in a wire. A rotating magnet created the sine wave and cosine wave… The sine wave and cosine wave – AC / alternating current – infinitely defined – “older than God, and will stay longer than God’s creation”
[7:36]
The magnetic coil breaks down into the concept of an electrical coil. Coils are not used except in the case of high frequency reception.
The opposite of inductivity is capacitance. The nomenclature, technical language of electronic engineers, has looked at Faraday to name the unit of the capacitor (Farad).
[10:00]
Capacitors, currents alternate or direct, resistors… measured in Ohms. the elementary law of electricity… Ohm is omega, because the “O” was given away for another unit.
Current – Ampere – Voltage
[13:50]
Explaining electronics through watermills and creeks, and water mills, and pools, etc.
A small creek (or small pipe) will give a big voltage drop.
[15:10]
Now to media and infrastructure
Introduction of the Railway system – electric telegraphy, and railroad systems – take a train a tunnel, tracks, and put two trains on it and you have 500 dead, an accident. So the stations and systems put in place to devise a means of transmitting between each.
James Watt – feedback assured steam engines. Faraday – electric generators. The question of industrial power and energy – Lasard Carnot (in the Napoleanic army – organised the armies), and his sons… we exiled into German, because they remained true to the French Republic after the reformation. Carnot Engine.
Botlzmann – suicidal – closed the theory of thermodynamics by introducing the concept of entropy into closed system
Thomas Pynchon’s – Entropy
#fk1_6
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Telegraphy – telegraph cables in Europe / America -
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The scientific origins of telegraphy – Carl F. Gauss (german) / Wheatstone (english) – digital equipment on the input and output side of the telegraph. Stereoscopy and stereoscope… American painter on a European trip – Samuel Morse, who learned about optical telgraphy and transfered it to Baltimore. Morse code.
[05:00]
Edgar Alan Poe, Exing A Paragraph – fictive story, newspaper man replaces all the letters “E” by the letter “X”. the newspaper becomes unreadable, that there is a statistical phenomenon – there are many “Es” and very few “Xs”. properties of
- in morse code, “E” is symbolized by one short dot point, whereas X is 5 morse code signs (so morse is statistical – it is an optimized alphabet).
- morse is a binary code (although you could say that it is triadic, as the pauses are important)
laying of cables – crimean war – st. petersburg cable runs – shannon ireland – newfoundland – cable running… “it was not capitalism as such, but technical infrastructure that created the global village (underwater cables – durable cables)
[8:00]
Technical infrastructure creating the global unit. from the telegraph cable, arose united press, associated press, the global trafficking of news. London’s “The Telegraph.” Reuters In London. Agence Press.
[8:55]Crossing the hudson river was hard, so NYC was connected to Richmond NYC – In Richmond, 4 crazy young sisters showed up out of nothing and pretended to have heard by night in their dreams, knocking spirits. (1850) Knocking spirits became famous by the agency of the NYT, which propagated this first mediatic effect – technical spirits. The backside of technical, psychological media – a surface effect of technology. The Fox sisters, the first mediatic event – propagated from Richmond / Hydesville
[10:36]
Forget about vapor and steam power – the system of the 1850-1900 – Arnold von and Wilhelm von Siemens – AC current as motor driver, AC as product of rotating magnetism. The electrification of middle europe.
[11:40 Tanya has a beamer problem]
Recognizing your cities as images as products of technology
[12:55]
Herman von Helmholtz. Arnold von Siemens was married to Ellen von Helmholtz, daughter of the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz.
Helmholtz – german idealism – giving birth to idealism in a way. Answering the Galvani question (why did frog’s legs move), by discovering that our nervous system is electrical. Our nerves are bad conductors, that’s why car drivers die. The electricity flows slowly in our nerve fibres… 100th and 10th of seconds.
Wrote treatises on eyes and ears. Connecting our eyes to Newton’s light theory. Systems of music and polyphonic harmony, and mathematical laws behind music. The first fourier analysis of musical sound.
Helmholtz travelled to the Chicago – shaking hands with Edison. 1893 – International Electrical Congress in Chicago.
#fk1_7
[00:00]
The standardisation of electricity was key – it is invisible, but you can die from it. The units of electricity were in deference to the miedival practices around ounces and inches.
Volt ampere and ohms are immediately translatable into meters, seconds, gram. the ISO standard.
Americans standardized guns, which lead to typewriters and sewing machines and so on…
[3:28]
Karl Ferdinand Braun – discovered crystals that were not fully conductive but not fully isolative. All semiconductors were based on this topic.
In put a sign wave – AC electrical input – crystal (diode) – rectification of the signal. Positive half of signal passes through the crystal. Equilizer and rectifier. Early radio reception would have been impossible without this crystal. Christmas 1947 in Bell Lab – transistor, leveraged Braun’s discovery.
[8:00]
When Edison was 15 – the civil war raged and the newspapers were not connected to telegraph lines. Edison was clever – he jumped onto trains and intercepted railway telegraphy of the battle news… he then published this info privately to make money.
After Mendo Park was built and invented “invention” as such. He invented the idea of an electrical infrastructure – cities like Chicago and New York were in a literal sense electrified. There were then power stations for production and transformers, standardized electrical swithches, standardized bulbs, etc. An important contribution to urbanization and modernization.
At the end of Edisons life, he was engaged in a bitter fight between Edison and Westinghouse. The central issue is the electrical standard that would be the basis of modern life. Westinghouse was on the AC side… worldwide. 110 V in the US. 230 in europe. Edison made the claim that AC kills better than DC.
Gramaphone and kinematoscope were not electrified… both inventions were mechanic and optochanic. Only in the ’20s were the media of the 19th century electrified.
#fk1_8 – taniah
[00:00]
Public transportation and the electrification of Berlin. First public transportation in Berlin would be a person carrying another person up until 1833. 1739, Vienna, founded a the system for fiaca – a horse drawn vehicle. 1814 for 33 horse-drawn carriages in Berlin… 1827 there were 100 horsedrawn vehicles, 20 years there were 1000 horsedrawn vehicle. It was foreseen that horsedrawn vehicles were going to need to be replaced to bring the workers from factories to living spaces.
The railway – society becomes mobile. “Railroads are the things that carried the old regime to the graveyard.” – Marx
The Bahnhoff’s were the end of railway lines into the city. But moving materials and people between the railway lines became cumbersome… Seeing the problem a connection was designed in 1851 to connect the train stations with the S-Bahn “ring.” THe older Berliners know this as a the “dogs head” as it looks like a dog head. The next step was to connect the ring in the middle…
[08:00]
Tracks in the city were built in Paris – big consortia were put together to build these lines. Since Berlin became the Capital of the Deutch Empire, there was need to put in track as even with a horse-tram, there was a benefit in terms of horsepower on track-laid routes.
[9:49]
Siemens experiment – 1881 – experiment to use electrical power for public transport – max speed 15 km/hr. Near walking speed
Exposition international de L’ectricite – place de la concorde to palais de l’industrie – 500 m
Becoming successful Siemens & Halske – most of the public contracts and permits for building trams.
[12:58]
Generator-driven electrical tracks for tram – 180 co-flow electricity. Siemens developed pantographs – the overhead wire system for transfer of electricity. 1882 – trolly buses “electromoton” – 1902 – electrification of the trams was complete. There was a farewell to all the horses in the city – there were no more horses! What happened to all the horses!?!
The trams – and then the Metro – 1886 – aboveground metro. The sewer system of Berlin, the groundlevel of water in Berlin is high. The 19th century gave Berlin a very modern sewer system.
[16:38]
Electrical trams didn’t stop where you wanted them to – and they were -
Rudolf Virchow – an early victim of acceleration of culture – at 80 yrs old, he tried to get off an electrical
U-Bahn systems were the first distributed electrical systems in the city, so they helped to electrify the city. He leapt at the age of 81 from a moving tram and broke his hip… and died.
The Great Electrification – Siemens – building houses, devising the equipment that would use electrical power (washing machines, etc)
[21:00]
Architecural styles: Brademann (S-Bahn) – Granander (U-Bahn – subway)
#fk1_9
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Edison – left the invention of the telephone to Alexander Graham Bell (Scotch by birth working in Boston). It was not intended to be technological invention, but an aid for the deaf.
[4:00]
James Clark Maxwell (London) – mathematical genius. 1860s – the four fundamental wave equations. Electricity, magnetism, light, electro-quantum mechanics (Richard Fyneman). These describe the interaction between electricism and magnetism.
Here we find the roots of Wiener’s cybernetics – straight line between regulation of the James Watt locomotive to Maxwell and to Wiener and signs of feedback control systems in animals and machines.
Cybernetics / Wiener – mathetmatical theorems – Angel’s logic
Heinrich Hertz – technical university of Carlsru – frequency – Hz – period – the inverse function of physical time. Hertz and Marconi – german professor experimented with the theory, but Marconi did work on a practical device.
Leonard Euler – Treatise on Music – introduced the concept of inverse time, frequency. It was named later.
[11:54]
Bologna – Marconi (Italian / English) – by inventing radio and antennas, had probably the royal fleet in mind. He moved on to London and equipped the royal navy with Radio apparatus… comms between ships. Marconi pushed on to send the telegraph sign ‘letter S’ – making all the cables under the sea laid since 1860s became outdated
Important to stress that there was only one radio emitter was allowed at the same time. No two radio stations could coexist, because in sending dots and dashes, Marconi’s signal smeared the entire frequency band (from lowest to highest). These dots and dashes were electrical noise – electrical smoke signals.
The overall development of wireless communications was towards allowing more and more receivers and transmitters.
[16:20]
The vacuum tube must be cleared of air and brought to an almost perfect vacuum. The bulb when turn off, glimmers slightly for some time – the Edison effect – In the vacuum energy flows are possible when no current runs through the coil of the lamp.
Only English and austrian and german people – took the scientific consequences – developed a tube diode, in the sense of Brauns’ crystal electrode. The tube diode, which proved very useful in radio reception.
#fk1_10
[00:00]
Braun during his straussberg years, tool the vacuum tube and invented the oscilloscope, where you can “see” alternating current. His Straussberg generators were a perfect sign wave. Other engineers tried to encourage Braun to make TV-imaging… but he said ‘no it is an experimental tool’
Edison in German and Siemens got together to develop electrical controlled radio – William II: Telefunken was forcibly created by merging Edison’s German interests and Siemens.
Lee Deferrest – inventor of the triode – American.
[06:03]
Pynchon and the triode. Before the triode, control required a proportional amount of power to the greater power being controlled. After the triode, a large or small amount of power could be controlled by the same input current power. (A devolution of materialism…?)
You can stop flow and maximize flow with the triode. The development of the tube – the very concept of amplification – is the historical fact of the invention of the tube. The AMP.
In some technical and aesthetic senses – the tube is more ‘elegant’ than the transistors.
#fk1_11
[00:00 - seems to be a jump topically - already into radio tranmission...?]
The modulation of high frequency signal with an information signal – the change in amplitude in AM, and the change in frequency in FM. Irregularity is required for the transmission of information (If I was a sign wave generator from one of Stocausen’s first pieces, then I wouldn’t be able to transmit any information).
The invention of the microphone allowed for the recording of low frequency
Marconi – WWI – had a monopoly on intership communication. Poor in efficiency. Only after the Marconi-coded ship the Titanic went down, did the international shipping community agree on Morse code as the intership communication protocol.
American / Imperial Germany had installed a telecommunication system that didn’t touch any British territory – 2 Aug 1914, the British cut this telecoms cable.
Paul Kennedy – cable history / fall of empires.
Fighting on the western front – move from telegraphy to telephony/transmission. All signals could be overheard by everyone, wireless bunkers / signal corps.
After the cutting of the German/US cable – 1917 Braun was arrested in America.
3000 signal corps people at the beginning of the war – 30,000 at the end of the war. The development of wireless instead of cable was a military necessity and efficiency.
Brecht’s Marxist theory of radio – he was totally mistaken as to the political and military function. The idea, “capitalism has produced radio without knowing the ends… communism knows the end of radio – to have people communicate with one another.”
This is flawed – Brecht didn’t understand that radio had been developed for a specific purpose… the question was more “what do we do with radio, now that it is not military.”
This was handled by the electrification of formerly technical media technologies. Electrification – pickups, electrical loudspeakers (instead of mechanical ones). The whole acoustic chain of was converted into electric chain by 3 ex-signal corps engineers, who were then bought by FOX-Century.
[16:47]
Ongoing story of electrification of the mechanical – Les Paul took the phonographic pickup and turned it into the guitar pickup.
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Theoretical consequence – general theory of amplification and feedback in electrical system. Made the methodological differentiation between positive and negative feedback.
Examples of positive feedback – Jimi Hendrix – feedback system which finally takes immense acoustic and electrical energy.
#fk1_12
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Examples of negative feedback – absolutely necessity of negative feedback for the control of systems. Negative feedback makes systems more safe and secure.
[break]
[01:17]
Focuses on electrical and physical theory of WWI…. AC is very difficult to describe and to analyze – as is music. Music has historically anticipated electricity and theory of music (mathetical) – 18th and 19th century, one outstanding piont – Swiss Bernouilli showed that every musical singer can be analyzed in terms of the superposition of their sounds (a temporal addition). A simple sing wave and it’s infinitely many multiples.
[3:21]
An addition of sin and cos superpositions at frequency multiples. Bernoulli / Fourier. You recompose this signal when you transform from the time domain into the frequency domain.
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In the time domain we are mortal – and in the frequency of domain we are gods and goddesses.
[7:21]
Oliver Heaviside (England) – Prof Gibbs at MIT – generalized the fourier transform for non-period signals.
In the cold war, the army and the pentagon needed to find a quicker mathematical tool – FFT – Fast Fourier Transform (Pentagon)
[09:49 - question]
The sine wave – the Fourier Transform forgets the ‘event-ness’ of things (the “lighting”). It only describes thunders and echoes (ondelets and wavelets combine the bodily and effect with shock and time). For tranditional music, and singing and talking – Fourier analysis does fine, and is sufficient for representations of time -
Practical mathematical and electrical tools – i.e.: filters, modulators – Bessel, Chebychev, Butterworth – define mathematically different filters. The frequency domain (the god-like domain) can be multiplexed. How steep and how smooth these cutoffs are is the quality of these filters.
CD-quality filters – the Chebychev filter used as it very sharply
[16:21]
The low pass filter – the mill creek and a moveable damn followed by a mill-wheel. The millers problem is the regulation of the filtered water – i.e.: not too much ‘noise’ in the water flow. If you have a pool and a weir, you can remove the high-frequency from the pool – and this is the low-pass filter.
The high pass filter – a mothers’ womb.
#fk1_13
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The high pass an d low pass filter – circuit diagrams.
Every pop-music acoustic signal is handled by these filters – analog devices – digital devices – there is no sound without filtering and mathematical processing. George Martin as a producer once commented, “There’s no original sound by no Beattle since 67.”
This electrification is akin to the difference between jazz music and pop music. Classical jazz – has no electrical tricks or devices implied. Pop music – lives from its electrical processing.
Low frequency jazz – low frequency jazz. Jazz since Charlie Parker – high frequency jazz (reminds one of the compression ratio for commercial radio – or ‘bass bin’ ragatton). Frequency modulation a precondition to WWII.
Military radio always has content – no need ot create it. High frequecny optical processing of signals – are the preconditions of WWII.
[5:05]
A young and simple minded engineer – had defined in 1884 how to change pictures / images into 1-dimensional data flows. That is to bring the picture into a sequences of dots. A continuation of the old mechanical medium called film – in order to translate the moving objects in an image, incredibly high frequencies came into play (1920 / 1930s).
America concentrated on the side of the sender – Germany on the side of the receiver (TV receiver). Given friendly relations before Pearl Harbour (or before the invasion of France). The exiled-Russian Borekin from RCA – and Nazi engineer Manfred Vener exchanged equipment and make the Olympics in Berlin (1936) the first televised event.RCA Chronoscope + Vernard Vener monitor reconstructed the moving picture for the public.
[8:46]
Marconi – High frequency radio (FM) was felt to not go through geographies, landscapes. E.g.: From Panzer tank to tank. Engineers were sent into middle mountainous region of Germany – 1934 – proved that FM could
1940 – Blitzkrieg error – 10 tank divisions used their wireless and they were victorious. The French troops were not allowed to use their tank radios. Walkie-talkies were invented by the US tank armies for the Africa war – as a replacement of FM transceivers in Tanks.
[11:34]
Guderian – the
The history of TV in germany and Britain – stopped the development of TV on the first day of the war. TV monitors and radar monitors were identical. The U.S. were not so concerned with the war – so televsion development there continued.
Radar was itself invented by a cologne based engineer who liked to measure the distance between himself and ships on the river rhine. Airplane detection resulted from this.
[15:00]
Anthony Moore – the 5 pink flloyd – the English air defence against Luftwaffen – experimented with two possibilities of how to detect the enemy aircraft at large, before hearing and seeing them. They built parabolic acoustic mirrors – where the enemy was supposed to enter. They would listen for the sound of the bombers – usually using blind veterans from WWI. The Radar chain – the “home” chain.
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Technical things become smaller – the tactical need was to miniaturise radar systems so they could be put inside a plane. Smaller tubes were needed.
[19:20]
One dramatic innovation – electronics before the war were freely soldered elements – and had to be replaced by the PCB (the printed circuit board)
#fk1_14
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The very origin of what later on became a computer mother board – all the components were arrested on one plane and soldered, so not disturbed by vibration, fire, wind, etc.
At the end of the WWII – another step – so many fighting planes in the air that it became necessary to automatically distinguish between friend and foe. Wireless radios were developed that sent waves and in the case of the friend – the waves would answer back ‘i am friend’ – and in the case of no answer it was an enemy (“transponder”). Percursor to the barcode, the radio frequency ID (RFID), the IR scanner.
Transponders were then used in tanks and planes – and AM modulation would just not do it. The transmission needed to be “individualised” driving use of wider bandwidth technologies.
The result of the war effort turned into civil and commercial commodities. RCA and other companies had time to develop TV systems – 1947, NTSC standard for three color transmission of TV signals. Inborn, limitation/failures – Never The Same Color. There was a color shift in the technology – especially on visages – was solved by a French / German group. Required having a stored image – i.e.: a memory:
Distinction here: Electronics = memory. Electrics = no memory.
[8:50]
The American war Venebar Bush MIT, Claude Shannon assistant. Worked with the best analog computer, and tried to pre-compute rocket trajectories. The same happened in Germany -
V2 balistic rocket – partly designed by computer system. The engineer who was developing the computer that would help design the rocket was contacted by von Braun… 6 hrs versus 6 months calculation time. More rocket came down over antworp than London.
The problem of miniaturisation. The rocket had to know its own position – so it had to measure it’s past, it had to have a memory. The rocket had to figure out where it was – which was done via acceleration. The rocket could always feel its own acceleration… which changes during the time of the rocket firing, and so the acceleration was a local variable that needed to be integrated – to derive speed.
#fk1_15
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Newtons most famous equations about acceleration, speed, distance.
Gravity Rainbow
[02:40]
Technological history – to what degree does technological determinism arise? Give a great part to innovative scientists and engineers. Nothing in the history is necessary in a strict Aristotelian sense – coule we live with history as mixtum compositum of structures and randomness and goals and hazards.
I don’t like physical models of histories – I like antagonistic one. England / German, north / south, as the outcomes depends on luck as well as ingeniousness. Challenge and Response – Arnold J. Toynbee.
E.g.: The Hero engine – could have cause a leap into the industrial revolution? The cultural background of the Greeks…
[07:30]
What do you want the engineer to do?
Take a revolver and go into the manager’s office and tell them that commercial forces should be secondary to engineering and aesthetic forces.
[09:20]
What would engineering be if not a standing reserve of these objects?
It’s up to the engineer to combine engineering precision with a cultural goal, up to the individual. Wars are a big positive challenge – the American problem – to few wars are not very good for engineering in America.
Speaking to Engineers – in knowing more about their past, they will hopefully restructure our futures in a more thoughtful or aesthetic way.
#fk2_1
[00:00]
electronics – currents can be stopped, and voltages can be stored (vs. electrical)
[03:00]
When FK was making electronic circuitry, he wanted some kind of echo effect… At the time one could buy “bucket charge” devices. Which was a series of capacitors, the transfer into which took a small amount of time. But after 1024 of these fire-brigade circuits… but it was a very noisy things. This concept is used in digtal cameras… buckets = pixels.
The limits of the water analogy – the analogue analogy
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Storage – transmitting – proceeding: The CPU as a perfect, universal medium (Intel’s internal circuitry)
The definition of a CPU as a perfect, a universal medium being capable of storage, transmission, proceeding.
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Today will be from storage media to the perfect media called digital computer.
Verbal definition – two triodes (tubes or transistors) block one another. The output of one is zero and the output of the other is one.
By an external pulse – the flip, flops to flop. This can go on and on and on “as long as technology wishes”
When my computer is still on in my room – some flip flops will have stored the state I left them this morning.
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Doors/gate
Lacan and cybernetics – 1953s – lecture on cybernetics and psychoanalysis – compared binary circuitry to automatic doors
Flip-flops in series and in parallel. Simple distinction – applies both to electrics and to electronics. You can imagine a river in the parallel case forking and then coming back together – enveloping an island – or in the serial case comprising a sequence of pools.
The historical origin of the idea of the flip-flop. There had to be some electronics to make certain ideas possible – Gieger counter…
Flip/Flop – master and slave nomenclature
Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage – not part of this story – notions of processing and population story. Nothing to do with the development and actual use of flip-flops. These are basic elements of electronics… the differential engine could be built from ‘cog-wheels’ or ‘flip/flops.’ The principle of slipping…
Are electronics required for technology? Is there something special about electricity, versus the mechanical manifestations of logic/computing. It is the slowness of digital electronics that makes it special – step-consciousness – consuming more steps. Digital processing is smaller steps, one after the other, to come to an algorithmic result.
Analog data processing – there are no steps at all… only flow, flowing – which is rather fast. These analog filters who’s example was given yesterday, can be constructed in a way that high-frequency acoustic or eletrical events can be processed in one instant. In one step.
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To imitate the lowpass and highpass filter in digital means requires a complex and lengthy algorithm – based on a cruel mathematical equation and taking about 1000 steps in order to simulate this analogous behaviour. Replacing the analog technology with the digital tech, and we demanded the satisfaction of the end-consumer, and now you see the incredible complex effort to satisfy your ears by digital means. These difficulties may have been overcome in 2010 – because of the brilliance of our equipment, but it has taken half a century to get to this result.
Moore’s law – the reason we are so advanced in our technology today.
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Another example how complex the digital circuitry in comparison to analog circuitry is. The very processes of digitalization. Simply said – there are no digital events in nature, in the world. Particle streams may be an exception, but these are only produced under conditions of high-tech equipment.
Digitalisation, has to take place very fast and very quick. The problem is always – you have one dimensional function of time, and you want to put this data stream on a CD or on a digital storage mechanism.
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In theory there’s one possibility for digitisation. This is the signal… the process is to assign the analog signal a digital numeric value.
In theory you can imagine a system of 1000 maximum of the digital scale (+/-). You could have 2000 comparators, each one of them looking at a single voltage range. In this way you would you come into astronomical domains of numbers.
So the easy way to tell is – ok the signal comes, and let’s limit our event range to the range of zero and 1000. Only positive events are allowed. First step – is the signal bigger than 500 or smaller than 500. Second step – is the signal bigger than 250 or smaller than 250, 125, etc. These are digital steps – from higher to lower powers of 2. 10^3 = 1000.
This is called a successive approximation approach – ADC – analog digital converter.
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This hardware device – which at the same time represents an elementory algorithm, is really ubiquitous these days. Everyone owns somesuch device. Sound processing circuitry in your mobile phone, computer, you have small microphone… input is digitized.
A didactical error – we have to reconstruct a simple elementary operation – Liebnitz 1691. Important question -
Since 202 – Europeans took over the number system from the Indian (700), transmitted to Southern Europe via Bagdad… Fibonacci of Piza brought numbers via Italy, then to the German imperial court in Palermo – Germano-Sicilian the first modern bureaucracy.
The number system… 0-9 produces 10 symbols.
Liebnitz question was – how many symbols are necessary for the number system in general. COuld it be more efficient? Could it be optimized? The answer is that the most efficient symbol system = two numbers.
#fk2_4 – MISSING
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Liebnitz and boolean arithmetic – carrier function, 1 + 1 = 10. In boolean logic there is no carry… AND / OR
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Boole and Liebnitz are the spiritual fathers of our counting… and deciding silicon chips
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Claude Shannon – big irishman, a nice white male… came to Boston, MIT. Assistant to Venebar Bush (Rosevelt’s top advisor during WWII). Shannon in early days was exposed to digital – “Shannon is crazy, he even thinks digitally”. His Masters thesis was about telephone relays.
Humphrey Bogart – choosing a number from the LA police department
Shannon showed that the logic of ORs and ANDs can be brought into circuitry. Two relays connected in parallel give an OR circuitTwo relays connected in series give an AND circuit
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Zero and one and logic…
Start with the mathematics of the last century
Hilbert – German – brilliant students, Von Heumann (hydrogen bomb) – 1933 – all of the scientist move from Germany and went to Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies.
Hilbert – gravestone – “we will know” (20th century). Contradicting the famous german saying “We Won’t Know” (19th century) What will we know? All of mathematics. Meta-mathematics.
In imposing this goal …. 1900 – everyone took up this problem.
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Hilbert had good reason to impose this demand – Set Theory (Cantor) suffered from inherent paradoxes. Hilbert wanted to solve these.
Hilbert was a practical man – e.g.: Beer glasses. Mathematics as visible written down symbols. He was not an idealist. Precisely because he was down to earth, he saw that mathematics was made up of stuff – metamathematics should treat mathematics in a structural sense – as a kind of machine.
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Godel gave the first rebuttal of one of Hilbert’s postulates. Hilbert’s belief in a Christian god.
Alan Turing comes into play – because he lost his Christian faith as a young man.
He was conceived in India, in 1912. Parents were british colonial service – born in London. DUring WWI, he was in London. His parents had to return to india, he was alone and isolated, lost like Rudiard Kipling.
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Alan Madison Turin – was uninterested in the opposite sex, had a first boyfriend who died when Turing was around 20.
Grandchester meadows, other side of the river Kent – laid his body down and conceived of the Turing machine. A “universal typewriter.”
Pink Floydd – Grandchester meadows
(Kittler gets choked up here…)
The decision problem – how to decide whether a given mathematical algorithm can be solved, or not. Hilbert’s terms (not Decisionism in the terms of Schmidt and Stalin).
Reading head – a scanner – that could distinguish between sign and no sign at a given place. So this universal structure typewriter could have written on it symbols, allowing it to immitate all other machines…
Up until Shannon and Turing – computer meant human, animal, slaves doing mathematics for military or academic procedures.
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Will the turing machine stop or not? If it stops – the problem can be solved. If it does not – the answering machine enters a state of “bad infinity” (Hegel).
The difference between equations and algorithms – finally comes down to solvability in general and solvability in finite time and space.
Complexity theory -
10, 15 times 16 – solved in finite time? Yes. Divisions and multiplications are ok. The Akerman function – assistant to David Hilbert – in the cases of 1:1 (2 input) – it is solved in microseconds.
The traveling salesman probelm – how to travel from city to city with the smallest amount of travelling. 100 cities – takes 5 minutes… 10000 cities takes super computers… There is a real limit – to that which can be computed.
#fk2_7
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Computability of a set of numbers….those that can be written down by a
1st computer was “Incredibly slow” turing machine – all computers are in principle turing machines.
Turing’s beloved proved that all computers are Turing machines.
If someone created a non-Turing computer, the American empire will crumble. Alanzo Church & Emil Post. Constructed a similar refutation of the Hilbert decision problem – but Alan Turing was the only one who built the computer.
Why? FK thinks it’s because of the materialist and godless approach of Turing…
Post gave LISP to the world – but Lisp is software not hardware. (Hardware is material, software is religion?)
Shannon and Turing in the engineers canteen – AT&T – We will construct a computer of average intelligence. What do you know as average intelligence – “like your chairman from AT&T.”
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From the German perspective – WWII – everybody was on the air, it was a wireless, radio war.
The possibility of interception – Swedish invented Enigma – typewriter able to code every input (3 rotors, complicated circuitry). The Germans were not suspicious enough to realise that everything encoded can be decoded – Adnrew Hodges (Turing’s biographer).
The British empire got Turing to join the cryptographical department. The result of Turing came about 3 or 4 weeks too late -
Midway between Oxford and Cambridge – small village, created to house the cryptography department.
During the Bliztkrieg – French bombers vs. German tanks. The cryptographic responses were 3-4 weeks too late.
Battle at Crete – New Zealander troops – German paratroopers were greeted with gun fire – Frietag confessed that he received an enigma decoding of the German attack.
The european part of WWII – as the battle of the atlantic was all important for the sustaining of Great Britain. The same holds true for the pacific side of the war. Simple telegraphic relay devices were found in Japan – William Friedman decoded the secret military Japanese code – and the price he had to pay personally for this brilliant solution was 3 months in an asylum.
War history on a strategic level
At least for transmission, in war (Kittlerian theory) – technical media beat each other without very much human intervention. WWI is beating…
#fk2_8
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… telegraph cables by wireless. WWII is starting with wireless and ending with computers on the victorious side.
This theory is Kittlerian as it is not found, for fundamental reasons in Sigmund Freud or Marshall McLuhan. Both men pretended that media in general were ‘extensions of man.’ I.e.: Mechanic and intellectual replacements of our nervous system.
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Relationships between computers and bodies… later
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From WWI to WWII – From WWII to ‘info war’ (Pentagon’s Term) – a great global war between equally powerful states
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The aftermath of war – and the irregular consequences of this war. WWII.
The first dedicated computer in the actual sense that was constructed – Christmas 1943. At the war’s end there were 13 of these Colossi. And the Pentagon very new – also finished in 1943. They new how the English solved the German secret code. The Americans had not comparable computation equipment at this time. At the end of the war – Secret Treaty – linking English and American technology/engineering development.
The English gave the computer to the Americans – who had enabled Britain to survive WWII. That’s why the computer seems to be an all-American invention.
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Conference of Potsdam – near Berlin – Churchill, Stalin, Trumann. Truman and Churchil left Stalin alone and they promised each other never to talk about computers before Russian ears. Stalin, never in his life, heard about the biggest soviet victory over the German armies, was won by the red army because Enigma had been decoded and sent to the Russians. The ‘secret’ of the computer lasted until 1974 – long after Stalin’s death – the first book on Turing and his exploits was allowed to be published.
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Radar – decisive for WWII. A radar sweep is very ‘smeared’ – and the return signal is very small/tight frequency
PCM – Shannon – Pulse code modulation – you can encode every number every letter every signal to transmit.
Digitalization was a theoretical and practical necessity. Digital computers, defined and transform their environment. In oder to avoid too many digitalization devices -
For the best dramatic conclusion of this half-day…
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Where were these cryptographic devices used after the war…? Where were they used? The receiving antennas were just turned in another direction – towards moscow. Now they intercepted Soviet Secret traffic…
In this way did technologies from WWII precipitate the Cold War? I.e.: We have all these tools – who will we use them on…?
Morphogenetic differential equations – difficult soviet codes -
The homosexual Alan Turing – would learn that other (Kim Filbey, Somhow McLean) Cambridge homosexuals were working for the Soviets. Turings homosexuality was made public – CIA / McCarthy time.
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The close interpretational liaison between the British and MI6 – throwing homosexuals out of the CIA… The British as slaves and the Americans as masters – flip / flops – the Brits followed suit.
Turing got female breasts, and in 1954 he killed himself by eating a poison apple, because he loved Snow White and the 7 Dwarves…
Suggestion that Bletchley Park secrets and Collosi were behind his death. Foreign espionage agencies?
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One of navigators killed himself in the same way…
Michael Ventris – Greek origin but living in England. Promising architect – had 3 or 4 years before his death had successful deciphered the Sir Arthur Fields Greek Script. Going back to 6 or 7 centuries before the appearance of Jesus. He proved that it must have been Greek.
Ventris had a car accident – suggesting also that his death was orchestrated.
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Pink Floyd – icy winds of night are gone / this is not your domain. Algebras are sensibly different – each from the other.
FK didn’t mention the analog computer – forgot to mention that the V2 computer – before Shannon theoretically proved that the whole of boolean algebra could be handled by telephone devices, a German engineer built a functioning computer which did arithmetic and logic (Conrad Zuse).
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Zuse’s computer is in the Telecommunications Museum. For private reasons as a student he didn’t like arithmetic calculations. The German army took the Z3 (Zuse 3) computer and used it for crazy purposes in the Airforce. The allied forces had growing difficulties to get raw materials and metals and such… so they built airplanes with metal failure problems – but Z3 was used to calculate the corrections of the plane, or the failure conditions of he planes.
After the war the computers lived for a few decades – until Intel took over. Some people think that computer graphics were invented in Zuse in the University in Stutgarde.
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It’s more didactic and fun to talk about the three founding fathers of our Turing galaxy – computer age – than to go into well developed / personal names (Paul S. Otellini – Pat Gelsinger). Instead of talking about these guys – we will go back to the founding fathers
Ingebord Bergman – there is no death in general, there are only personal ways to die – that is to be murdered by somebody or some thing.
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Now a death which was really a suicide without knowing it – Janosh Johan Johnny Von Neumann. Millionaire jewish Budapesch family of bankers. Hungarian Janosh changed his name to Johan – taught under Hitler’s regime and then moved to Princeton, where he met Alan Turing… becoming Jon Von Heumann. A great and elegant womanizer and car driver…
In working on the atom – Von Neumann got cancer in all his limbs. He dies in a military hospital in Washington – with armed guards outside his door… in case he tried to give away state secrets.
The only one of the three founding fathers who dies of a happy death, Claude Shanon – a wonderful husband and inventor, constructs wonderful toys, alzheimers, a happy forgetful death.
The most moving of Shannon’s toys has dissapeared – the house was flooded. Bell Labs has a photo of it. A simple black box – the very concept of black box comes from WWII. Some secret device of the enemy could probably fall into the hands of the other side – and the device would explode if opened. And so the black box should not be opened but tested to input and output
Shannon’s black box – The Ultimate Machine – the black box was just like a black coffin… Arthur C Clark:
Nothing could be simpler. It is merely a small wooden casket, the size and shape of a cigar box, with a single switch on one face. When you throw the switch, there is an angry, purposeful buzzing. The lid slowly rises, and from beneath it emerges a hand. The hand reaches down, turns the switch off and retreats into the box. With the finality of a closing coffin, the lid snaps shut, the buzzing ceases and peace reigns once more. The psychological effect, if you do not know what to expect, is devastating. There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing — absolutely nothing — except switch itself off.
Greek engineer – a flying machine
We are born once and we die once – the meaning of the black box is that there is no Christian eternity.
Shannon’s office – big picture of David Hilbert – Shannon had changed the photo of Hilbert and added a Hitler mustache.
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Just as Turing did – Shannon worked for crypto-analysis… but Shannon wasn’t allowed to publish crypto-analytical findings. The information theory of cryptographic systems couldn’t be published until the early fifties. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication Systems.” Didn’t analyze the specifics of war, etc., – it just took a general case of information systems.
The afterword by some popularizing authors – so that some of the depths of the mathematical part has been overlooked.
After Shannon had been divorced – and remarried, Elizabeth – Shannon became interested in poetry and literature. That’s why strangely enough – in a very mathematical paper, James Joyce and crossword riddles are mentioned, and philological questions are taken up.
In private – Shannon wrote poetry, very elegant and very complicated, and very formal – poetry (e.g.: Jon Dunne)…
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Inspired by his wife – Shannon looked at communications systems – the simplest case, that of letters.
On the input side, the system takes as its input human writing or human speech – and as output it produces alphabetic letters. Transmission of these letters without the added noise of cryptogrpahy – i.e.: intended versus physical noise of the channel. I.e.: treating the noise of a channel as cryptography…
Encoder and decoder – channel in between.
In original cryptographic research – Shannon mentions the case where an enemy gets a connection to the channel – and builds an unfriendly decoder, and unfriendly receiver.
Why letters as a beginning instead of analog, continuous signals? Shannon’s digital thinking – interest in language – as criticised by Wiener
More and more mathematical – Shannon makes his way from random letters to markov chains (1st and 2nd order). At 6th or 7th order markov chains, Shannon approximates English text, by mathematical tools. Markov – St. Petersburg invention… Tools for approximating poems and literature since Markov’s days. Pushkin used Markov, and english sentences were Shannon’s goal.
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Crossword puzzles –> markov chains. You have to intuitively feel the Markov Chains. The Gold Bug – short story of a pirate’s treasure hidden on an island… cryptographic message. The most frequent letter is “E”, the second most frequent “H”, third most frequent “T” (THE). Markov chains link “H” and “E” and “T” in these ways.
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Some letter digrams – there are certain sequence of two letters – e.g.: “QU”. This never appears the other way around – the second letter in this diagram is a redundancy. You don’t need this “U” to produce any sense of the “Q” itself.”
Shannon got to his theorum that code could be optimized in relation to everyday script – in order to spare transmission time, you can just skip the “U” and the receiving end get the message never the less.
Shannon then tried to quantify the inherent redundancy of different languages – by % – these cryptoanalysis ideas showed that there are redundancies – but we need these redundancies to communicate with one another.
There arises the theoretical question or problem – what is the optimal code? In the case of a fictional writing system (1 and 0) – Shannon’s probalistic function of negentropy – the degree of ‘orderedness’ of a system.
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The optimum distribution in a random sequence of zeros and ones – in a probablistic sense – is that they both occur equally often. I.e.: the ones and the zeros are present in a 50% amount each.
Eg.: A letter sequence that contains only zeros and only ones, it has NO information. therefore a letter sequence with 50/50 ones and zeros is optimum. But the most senseless random noise, is also 50%/50% ones and zeros. There are no semantics represented here.
A message which remains identical to itself under all given conditions of time and space, is not worth transmission at all.Shannon’s example would be the PIKittler’s example would be the dekalog – that stays the same after it is transmitted
What about cases where you have alternating zeros and ones – well ordered. Shannon doesn’t discuss this case – answer will come…
Linking Liebniz + Shannon is FK’s philosophical duty.
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Information theory – Shannon continues the functions as discrete digital with infinitessimal powers of 2.
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The transistor – John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley
Bardeen was a terrible racist – he wanted to emasculate blacks in order to put an end to the race…
Change in size from the triac (vacuum tube) into the discovery of silicon crystals – micrometers, production of silicon dioxide
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Nomenclature – the cathode and the anode – the Collector, the Emitter and the Base.
Workload – “LOAD” – the main function of the transistor is to ‘steer’ this workload
Transistor noise – comes from alpha particles coming from alpha and gamma particles. These are the only true random events – generating randomness in a computer is a contradiction in terms. E.g.: Computer music needs noise in order for things to sound organic… Buchla / Moog.
With field effect transistors – your little finger can control this world…
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Further militarisation – U.S. military wanted a set of transistors, asked a set of many many transistors, on the same silicon die. Birth of the integrated circuit. Very small transistors – arranged on a single piece of silicon… could compute aspects of trajectories and could be put inside a rocket…. The Minute Man Rocket.
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The opamp – operational amplifier – why two inputs? Why should we increase and decrease the the signal?
Feedback theory – with feedback the amplifier becomes much more linear and without distortions. We can do much more with an negating input…
Bob Moog – upstate NY – electronics company. One voltage oscillator was made – the sequence of higher and higher octaves…
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Voltage controlled oscillators – linear voltage input and frequency output… Moog wanted an exponential characteristic – because music is Pythagorean.
Input of 1V = 10 HZ, 2V = 100 HZ, 3V 1000 HZ
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The transistor behaves sometimes – a resistor who’s resistance can be controlled by voltage. Voltage controlled resistance – is an analog phenomenon.
The transistor is used only as producing its two extreme outputs for digital systems. The square wave – the clock – idealised ‘instantaneous change’ of the signals.
For the mathematical versus physical in the digital system – the physical reality actually doesn’t matter – the first idealisation that really works (in juxtaposition to Plato’s ideas)
The opamp, set up as negative feedback for a digital clock — is a living paradox… The output and input are inverting one another. Not real as the wires and physical systems have inherent resistance and capacitance. This setup was factually the master clock.
Master clock keeps all in sync… all chips on a motherboard need to be synchronized.
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Elementary machines to actual computer devices
Central Processing Unit – versus RAM
During the Cold War – asia surpassed the US in producing hardware RAM (Pentagon accepted this situation… but CPUs would be made in the US). (Understanding of the use of CPU / RAM as slave and master?)
The Pentagon and the NSA almost forced the hardware industry into the next step – VLSI. NVidia corporation has just been surpassed in integration capacity – with nVidia GPUs having a
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Commercial war contiues on the conditions of peaceful international conditions. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan vs USA.
Threefold differentiation between Software, Hardware, Wetware -
- Hardware – (main topic for these three days, from scratch)
- Software – alphanumeric code – “readable” – syntactical
- Wetware – people
What formerly was done by wetware should be moved to software. When software runs too slow, we move it to hardware.
The last decade – especially in computer graphics. They are still slower than the SUN. In microseconds the Sun changes this room into a color wonder.
Against a top-down approach – pleading for the bottom up approach for philosophical and biological reasons.
Start with the stipulation that the first computers were specific to a task – not generalised computers. The first general computer was taken over by the great genius Von Heumann – and wanted to get immortality. Von Heumann gave definitions of the hardware architecture system.
In this hardware system -
Von Heumann also took over the ENIAC computer – just like a synth – many little cables. There were plugging people – women who were directed by Von Heumann’s wife. Programming started with women… compiling was the logical continuation of pluggin in – Vice Admiral Grace Hopper
Programming with cards – card punches…
Opcode – hexadecimal code – multiply would be the number 17. division would be the number 18. These were then replaced by mult and diff and add… All of these things, of course can be implemented with the AND and the OR gate.
#fk2_17
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The word Assembler – historical linguistics – the history of the indo-european languages. From the time of the Euroean Greeks up until the modern languages. All the flexibility and richness of conjugation – has been lost in the last few thousand years. English would be the end of this line…
English: I write, I wrote, I’ve writtenAssembler: Write (functionalist language)
Assembler code is only commands. There are no objects, there are no cases, there are no tenses. Assembler is the best way to write fast code.
In order to help with dealing with real numbers when describing trajectories or quantities of colors, quantities, etc. Numerical co-processors – GPUs – etc.
The architecture of a usual mainboard – laptop / desktop / mobile
- CPU <===> RAM
- Classical simplication – interelation between processing and storing data
- Astronomical overview – the infrastructure shows up (the lowest thinkable level is still one single flip flop)
Processor / Memory / BusProcessing / History / Transmitting
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Questions – How are computers going to change – please postpone this question for tomorrow
In the artificial reality of software – things have to be in order. In Cantor’s set theory – every number has two faces. It is at the same time an ordinary number (it is the ordering itself) and a cardinal number (the data the number it actually is).
Computers are not ordered very strictly, but very hierarchical in their architecture. Transmitting busses are very important – the very melancholic fact that there can only be one CPU.
Data is unable to process itself. Plato’s theory of writing – he is against writing, against books. Only oral teachers can defend themselves. All data is passive, and requires overcoming by two meausures – a channel / bus like Shannon’s theory of information and a CPU which is missing in Shannon’s early view of things.
Shannon’s system can encode and decode every given input – in so far as it processes this input twice, at the transmitting and receiving end… Produces new results.
Shannon was into collaboration – CPU systems (Von Heumann…)
Flusser said that Computers were an engineer’s decideratum – the statics of bridges and iron construction became more and more complicated. The architects were responsible for the static stability of their construction, were in desperate need of computers to solve all these difficult equations… for security and responsibility reasons. Architects were not powerful enough to get their will – high commands of armies were powerful enough and have gotten their will.
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readings