Why The First Computers Were Made Out Of Light Bulbs

Light bulbs were such a good idea, they became the symbol for good ideas

My mind is constantly blown how far humans have come in the last 100 years. Edit: Great to see awesome comments here. The goal is to become a peaceful species to explore the cosmos. Let's overcome the great filter!

I designed and built my first computer with vacuum tubes in 1957. Being a ham radio operator I knew a little about electronics. Also, I was a lazy math and physics major. There were 2 computers in town. One belonged the TVA. Being a part of the government, I was refused access. The other belonged to the largest bank in town. It took up the entire 3rd floor of one of their buildings downtown. They explained how it worked. Several friends contributed tubes. Large and not exactly cost efficient, it did less than my slide rule. It did give me a bit of a leg up years later in getting a job with an airline as an assembly language core programmer on IBM 360s.

I was a kid when solid-state electronics were replacing vacuum tubes in consumer products. I remember that radio and TV repair was a widespread cottage industry. The best in that field were able to adapt and stay afloat, until the advent of integrated circuits.Great video 👍👍

I've lived my whole life hearing about vacuum tubes and never really knowing how they work. This was an amazing presentation connecting lightbulbs to transistors. I'm stunned.

As a Computer Engineer, I would like to thank you for illuminating the origins of my profession. This was an exceptional, historical documentary.

As someone who programs, the title made absolute sense to me, as anyone who codes knows you almost never know what actually is going wrong when something does, so writing code that gives you cues of at which point the code breaks, in a more analog design, using lightbulbs as status indicators makes a lot of sense

The Z3 was a German electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse in 1938, and completed in 1941. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. The Z3 was built with 2,600 relays, implementing a 22-bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz.

Seeing the progress of computers laid out in a timeline is one of the most fascinating things to me. I've probably seen/ read the story about a dozen times and it's still interesting

I have to give mad props to your editor/animator(s). They do such a tremendous job distilling your scripts into visual language even though we all know none of this is actually classical mechanics at its roots. The classicality of it is emergent and the art style helps with that even though it is not explicitly said.

Dude, I’ve watched so many of your videos, and you are one of my absolute favorite channels on YouTube. Your team does such an amazing job between research, writing, producing, editing, etc… Veritasium makes GREAT content! Please keep doing what you’re doing! Thanks!

Vote for making video about silicon computers😊

Mad props to Veritassium for explaining such a complex subject in such a simplified manner. Brilliant!

As a 3rd year Electrical Electronics Engineering student, I can say that this video is by far the best video that made me finally understand all these theoretical concepts we took in our lessons, you are a true genius

As a electronics student I knew what vacuum tubes are but finding out the history behind them was super interesting.

This makes me think about the people who built calculators and computers in Minecraft using the in-game “electricity” system called Redstone. It started as just making switches that could automatically open doors when you hit a button or stepped on a pressure plate to trigger it, but it eventually grew into more and more complicated electric systems until people eventually built calculators and even computers in the game. I remember seeing a video where someone built a computer in Minecraft that was running Minecraft itself in a scaled down version, on a screen made of Minecraft blocks. Someone even built a computer that was able to connect to the internet and they were able to order a pizza through the game that then was delivered to their house. I’m sure by now people have built huge and even more complex computing systems in the game and I have no idea what their capabilities even are at this point.

For the record I have worked in IT for over 30 years and this is the first explanation of how we got from light bulbs to circuits that actually made sense. Showing the model K went a long way to understanding it.

semi conductors are just magic

As someone who works for a commercial and industrial lighting agency, I love this. Such a great history lesson. This is the kind of Veritasium video I love to see!

As a guy who majored in computer science, I gotta say this is one of the coolest videos I've seen in the Youtube science community in a while. I never made the connection between lightbulbs and the invention of vacuum tube based machines. Thank you Derek for putting together this amazing narrative for the fundamental turning point of electronic computer history!