The 5,000 Year History of Information Technology

The Power and Story of Information

Spark (2019)

Film Review

This documentary looks at the importance of language, symbols and coding in enabling human ideas to endure over time. The narrator, physicist Jim Al-Khalili begins 5,000 years ago when written language first developed in Mesopotamia.

According to Al-Khalili, writing was the only form of “information technology” until 1804 when Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a mechanical loom. The latter used a primitive system replicate intricate patterns in weaving silk brocade.

This would be followed, in 1840, by the invention of Morse code and the electrical telegraph. These two inventions enabled rapid transmission of information nearly anywhere in the world.

Next would be the computer, first conceptualized in 1936 by Alan Turning, in his paper  “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”*

Turing was trying to discover whether it was possible to create a set of rules to carry out complex mathematical operations. He was trying to test his theory that rules-based calculations could be carried out by machine.

Claude Shanon of Bell Labs would develop the technology (computer code) for communicating these “rules” to modern computers. All computer coding is based on complex strings of 1’s and 0’s (originally designating the on-off status of an electrical signal). These are known as binary digits or “bits.” 

*The Entscheidungsproblem (German, “decision problem”) is a famous problem of mathematics formulated by David Hilbert in 1928: Is there an algorithm that will take a formal language and a logical statement in that language outputting “True” or “False” depending on the truth value of the statement?