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Computer Science / Unit 1   CS 0013 short lesson, about 20 seconds

"Old Computers Couldn't Compute It"

Captions available

The idea

Speed separates old general-purpose computers from new ones; computability does not — a problem computable today was computable on the earliest machines, given absurd amounts of time.

In practice

A phone and a room-sized vacuum-tube computer reach the same answers at wildly different speeds.

Where people slip

"Faster" never became "able to compute new kinds of things."

Your place on the trail

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Unlocks

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