Television Machines That Think

By Philip Elmer-De Witt

When CBS hired a newly minted Univac to analyze the vote in the 1952 presidential election, network officials thought it a nifty publicity stunt. But when the printout appeared, an embarrassed Charles Collingwood reported that the machine couldn't make up its mind. It was not until after midnight that CBS confessed the truth: Univac had correctly predicted Dwight Eisenhower would swamp Adlai Stevenson in one of the biggest landslides in history, but nobody believed it. It is a defining moment in THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, a surprisingly satisfying five-part history of the computer that starts April 6 on PBS. Crafted from old footage and fresh reportage by a team of veteran Nova and BBC hands, it is less a chronicle of hardware than a loving exploration of the sometimes rocky relationship between the first mindlike machines and the people who created them. Heady data for a generation that tends to take its Macs and PCs for granted. P.E-D.