So we had machines that could combine code and electricity to help us count things.
But our physical world is more complex than that. The universe is governed by physical laws that require more than just counting to be understood and measured.
Simply throwing a ball for your dog, for example, involves several mathematical calculations involving speed, trajectory, friction and the strength of gravity to work out exactly where it will land. Which is probably why it keeps ending up in your neighbors garden.
Mathematicians could work out that kind of thing with pen and paper. And this is how the world worked for a while: machines made the rugs and counted things for us, while WE did any more complicated math calculations as needed. Anybody who lived next to a mathematician could rest assured no balls would end up in their garden.
But this arrangement could not go on forever, because while the scientific experts were continuing to do complicated calculations by hand, the world was changing around them.
Please watch our final video presentation below to understand why the work of complicated calculations finally had to be handed to machines alongside fabrics and counting. As our final video, it's feature-length at a whopping 17 minutes! But it's the final one of these, promise.
Please sit back and enjoy the last long video (17:45):
Well done for sitting through all 17 minutes of that! It was a lot to go through because it was a major development for a major world event, and forever changed the way number-based calculations were carried out by us.
We promise there will be no more long videos, but there is one more moment in history we need to look at. In everything we've seen so far, from Jacquard's Loom to Hollerith's Tabulating Machine to the Havard Mark 1, although technologically the machines changed considerably, the coding method still remained the same. It always involved punching holes into cards.
Instinctively we know that something about the coding process clearly changed, because that's not what we are doing today when we type letters into a screen. We hinted at this at the end. But we also hinted that maybe it still is! What's that all about?
To find out, click the button below to move on to the final chapter in our history of coding, where we will finally answer the question of what exactly happened to hole punching thing: