Their operation is predictable and repeatable.

And three of the smartest people were

Stan Ulam, Richard Feynman and John von Neumann.

That's Freeman, a long time ago, and that was me.

Barricelli had the concept of the code as a living thing

Here we are in 2012, a very futuristic sounding date. And yet I'm beginning with a really quite ancient algorithm.

And that's when we got the Internet.

We've had digital revolutions in communication and computation, but precisely the same idea, precisely the same math

However, the ENlAC had very limited internal memory, storing long random sequences was not possible.

That was designed on that machine, in the woods behind the Institute.

George Boole took Leibniz's binary code and created Boolean algebra, and John von Neumann took Boolean algebra and created the digital computer.

And that's what all these machines are doing, except, instead of doing it with marbles, they're doing it with electrons.

So June 1945 actually, the bomb hasn't even been dropped yet and Von Neumann is putting together all the theory to actually build this thing, which also goes back to Turing, who, before that, gave the idea that you could do all this with a very brainless, little, finite state machine, just reading a tape in and reading a tape out.

The essentials were all there all the things that make these machines run.

The Graph'g Beam Turn On. This next slide, that's the as far as I know the first digital bitmap display, 1954.

And real soon, we're actually going to be synthesizing the proteins, and, like Steve showed us, that just opens an entirely new world.

This was the last great analog computer at MlT a differential analyzer, and the more you ran it, the worse the answer got.

Von Neumann saw how you could build the machines that now, last count, four million of these Von Neumann machines is built every 24 hours and Julian Bigelow, who died 10 days ago this is John Markoff's obituary for him he was the important missing link, the engineer who came in and knew how to put those vacuum tubes together and make it work.

IAS, or the Institute for Advanced Study Machine, which was built in the Institute of Advanced Study, which is maybe about a mile and a half away from this classroom.