How did the 1880 US Census and the end of World War 2 lead to the invention of the computer? What was it that kickstarted the Information Age? Come with me as we find out how the need to count everyone in 1800s America directly lead to the modern information age and all the technology we take for granted.
So just how do you count everyone in a large country like the US, and once you’ve gathered all that data, how can a machine be instructed to sort and organise the information so it makes sense to someone?
In fact, how do we even program computers to sort data? Sorting is a fairly easy thing for people to do, we do it every time we want to play a game using cards. However what process would we take when using a computer?
In this video I go through the history of why it’s necessary to automate this task, the people involved and then look at several sorting algorithms – bubble sort, insertion sort, quick sort and merge sort.
