Who invented the first computer? No question that chief engineer Presper Eckert was the “sparkplug” of the ENIAC project. This is a 5 hour conversation with Eckert about his childhood inventions, his early work with counting circuits and the steps that led to the development of ENIAC. It was the first all electronic computing machine. (1991)
Listen to what he has to say about who took what ideas from whom.
Alex Randall on Voice of America – from Russia and Ukraine – download
This is a live report – from Moscow. Alex had just been to visit ANI – the Agency for News and Information – a tiny news enterprise, the first free media business in the new Commonwealth of Independent States. The Soviet Union had ended and the giant TASS news agency was still delivering the “official” news to millions of people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the nations that were part of the Soviet Empire. ANI was tiny – a handful of people, operating with dial-up 300 baud modems, cassette recorders and they were facing down TASS – armed only with news and information that did not have the government’s official imprint. ANI was the first breath of freedom of information in the former Soviet Union. “This is Alex Randall reporting on the freedom technologies on the Voice of America.”
Timothy Leary at the Boston Computer Society – October 22 1986
No, he is not talking about drugs. Timothy Leary was also a computer maven and this is a lecture about the social impacts of computers… Before the Internet was popular. The Monastary as the mainframe of the Middle Ages and the democratization of technology. Delivered to the Boston Computer Society October 22, 1986
Alex Randall talking about Freedom Technology – Download
The Berlin wall had just been pulled down. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The absence of totalitarianism does not automatically give rise to democracy. How can Americans stimulate the formation of democratic institutions in these countries where freedom of thought had been so restricted, where every typewriter and copy machine was state property? Send them computers! We created the East west Foundation to solicit donations of used computer hardware from Americans, refurbish them, consolidate whole systems and distribute them to organizations that would help build a Civil Society. This is Alex Randall as Keynote speaker at the COMDEX computer trade show in 1991.
Alex Randall 5 