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You may not remember [Mr. Wizard], but he was a staple of nerd kids over a few decades, teaching science to kids via the magic of television. The Computer History Archives Project has a partially restored film of [Mr. Wizard] showing off sounds and noise on a state-of-the-art (for 1963) Tektronix 504 oscilloscope. He talks about noise and also shows the famous IBM mainframe rendition of the song “Daisy Bell.” You can see the video along with some extras below.
You might recall that the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” paid homage to the IBM computer’s singing debut by having HAL 9000 sing the same song as it is being deactivated. The idea that HAL was IBM “minus one” has been repeatedly denied, but we still remain convinced.
Can you imagine a TV show these days that would teach kids about signal-to-noise ratio or even show them an actual oscilloscope? We suppose that’s what YouTube is for.
At about the 17-minute mark, you can see some enormous walkie-talkies. A far cry from today’s cell phones. At the 27-minute mark, another film shows how engineers at Bell created the song using a mainframe.
We wish there were a modern version of [Mr. Wizard]. Then again, there’s no reason you can’t fill in. You might not be on TV, but you can always drop in on a few classrooms.
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