hi i'm walter isaacson and welcome to the digital revolution we often think of history it's up you have to go into the wayback machine and go way back in time in order to understand but the good thing about the history of the digital revolution is it's happening now we're all a part of it every time we use facebook every time we have an election every time we use social media or the internet but for the purposes of this course we're going to go back in time to start not back to where you could i guess start with the abacus but go back to the 1830s and 1840s with adel lovelace and so that's why we call the course the digital revolution from ada to zuckerberg now you know history of the digital revolution let's think about that for a second what does that phrase mean it seems like a pretty simple phrase you know history of the digital revolution i get it well let's parse it word by word first of all there's history what does it mean the history of something you know sometimes we think history is just one damn thing after another you know click click click 1492 up to 1942 or something in fact history is about change how change happens why change happens who causes change and who resists it whether it's people or great forces of history causing change and what are the backlashes to change and what about that phrase digital the digital revolution we use digital all the time but we don't have a positive really think of what is digital mean well digital means that it's like digits 0 1 0 0 1 on off very discrete digital numbers as opposed to analog which are waves and there's sort of a lot in between the waves it's sort of a smooth transition where digital is click click click and it so happens that this revolution is called the digital revolution because it's based on the fact that every type of information can be encoded in binary digits also known as bits and those binary digits can be processed in circuits with a whole lot of on off switches now let's pause for a second and think what's digital what's analog well a slide rule as you see is analog it slides you know i remember my dad used to use it and he would show how you could get into a in between numbers and everything else whereas an abacus is digital of course the old-fashioned clocks with the sweeping second hand those are analog you know they sort of move slowly whereas a digital clock is of course digital the interesting thing is our brain is sort of analog or mainly analog it's not done with zeros and ones ons and offs and click click clicks it's done in sort of a wet wear in which there are hormones and chemicals in which they're phases of things and that's going to be pretty interesting because we sometimes talk about artificial intelligence right well if it's artificial intelligence of the digital sort the type we would do on computers then now the information has to be quoted in zeros and ones and that's fundamentally different from sort of the analog digital mix that's our brain cells so we're going to look at that and whether there's always going to be a fundamental difference between digital machine intelligence and human brain intelligence and then there's that word revolution we're talking about the history of the digital revolution what does revolution mean well a lot of your history professors will sort of disparage the notion of revolution they'll say there's never been any real revolutions everything evolves from what went before it even the renaissance was just an evolution not a revolution from the middle ages and certainly you know we look at the industrial revolution with the creation of the steam engine the scientific revolution where galileo and newton come in and do things some people say those are revolutions other historians say no those just evolve from what went before my favorite historian of science up at harvard there's a guy who wrote a book on the scientific revolution his name was steven chapin and he had the most wonderful first sentence it said his first sentence read there's no such thing as the digital revolution scientific revolution there's no such thing as a scientific revolution and this is a book about it and what he said was that those people who lived at the time of the scientific revolution were aware that they were living through something different that things had changed and i think that's true of the digital revolution as well i grew up on napoleon avenue not too far from tulane and in my basement we soldered circuits together me and my dad he was an electrical engineer and when suddenly things like personal computers and then the iphone came out i realized i was part of a really major shift in history that was going to change not only our technology but the way we lived so that's why i believe that the digital revolution was is and was a true revolution and that's we're going to be talking about now the history of the digital revolution it depends on three great inventions the digital revolution does the computer the internet and the microchip we think of them as all being mushed together it's all being the one thing but in the 1950s and 60s these three inventions get invented totally separately computers are invented totally separately from the idea of a network and they're invented separately from a transistor or a microchip it's really when those three inventions come together the computer the internet and the microchip when they all combine in the 1970s and 80s that you really get a digital revolution one of the things about the revolution is that it was collaborative with all due respect to al gore we don't know who invented the internet or the microchip or the computer although we'll study it in this class because no one person it wasn't like edison you know doing a light bulb or alexander graham bell doing a telephone it wasn't a guy or a gal going to a garage or a garrett and having a light bulb moment and inventing something it was all invented by teams and likewise that's imprinted in the dna of the digital revolution a collaborative spirit where there are no gatekeepers anyone anywhere can produce things and share it with anyone else anywhere it's a totally collaborative distributed process and because of that it's a connection between humans and machines that are really the strength of what the digital revolution is all about instead of artificial intelligence i like to think of what we call augmented intelligence in other words what a machine and a computer can do together will always be stronger than what a machine can do alone or what a human can do along that's one of the themes of this course i'm not one of these people worries about artificial intelligence because i think the history of the digital revolution is about human interfaces with computers or to put it more simply how do we connect with our computers in a nice easy going seamless fashion that's what's driven the digital revolution and i also believe the digital revolution is driven by people who can connect the humanities to the sciences people can connect technology to liberal arts that's what steve jobs one of the subjects of mine of my biographies always did whenever he introduced a product he ended with the slide of technology street meeting liberal arts street and as you see he said i always thought to myself this is what he told me one day as a humanities kid but i also liked electronics and then i read something that edwin land of polaroid said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences and i decided that's what i wanted to do one of the last product launches he did i went out to see and i saw that slide on the screen it was for an ipad too that he was launching and he said when he put that slide on the screen it's in apple's dna that technology alone is not enough we believe that it's technology married with the liberal arts married with the humanities that yields the results that makes our hearts sing so that's another theme of this course which is it's not just about the technology it's about connecting the technology to the humanities the creativity of our digital age are those who connect the arts and the sciences leonardo da vinci his vitruvian man was a symbol of that but from leonardo da vinci to steve jobs the greatest innovators are those who believe that beauty matters and when it comes to that the next lecture is about one of those people who truly understands that beauty matters the daughter of lord byron ada lovelace who is the beginning of our digital revolution