Wow I honestly think this lecture will go down in history as the most informative, accessible and hence the best explanation of a whole generation of technology that has now become so ubiquitous that most have no concept of its background. I am 65, I came up in electronics through this history, your name was there, I would like to shake your hand and thank you for a wonderful lecture.
The introduction omitted one of Carver Mead's important attributes. Even as a teacher of beginning undergraduates he was innovative and effective. In the days before most high school students had access to computers I arrived at Caltech knowing nothing about programming. In his one-term course we developed a hypothetical language simply by discussing what a computer language would need, and defining it step by step. We left the course not knowing how to program any real computer, but with a deeper understanding than we might have gained any other way.
This video should be shown to kids in school as an obligatory lesson. This is incredible and i've always wondered how far back the history of electronics development goes. Turns out it started roughly 220 YEARS AGO. That's almost a quarter of a millenia. Wow!
Super informative talk. Packed with knowledge and put over in an enjoyable way. Great job Carver thanks for putting this together. Should be on T.V. instead of the poor quality documentaries we get these days.
What if you went back to 1986 when 3D graphics was just coming into view and invented triangular curves. there is a corresponding curve for every side of any triangle. Why well just graph a slice of a circle no bigger than a semicircle changing one of the radius lengths and progressing the one radius to the other in the simplest linear way or you could progress the radius in more advanced ways by changing the progression line. This works well in all dimensions. I know it seems too triangular not to relate in some deep way to calculus unlike NURBS.