I think he's genuinely fascinated by Alan's mind

@Jake-Amir Blumenfeldwitz that's kind of the joke, trees are crucial to human civilization but he chooses to employ the idea specifically to talk about the necessity of wooden clogs for destroying machines. the thought that we would be nowhere without trees isn't profound because it's quite obvious, but the comment's funny because it's employed in such a dumb way.

I thought Stephen was having a WTF moment!

I suspect that, for all Stephen’s education, Alan is probably smarter

Like John Lloyd said, Stephen is about facts and Alan is about twisting facts into new shapes ("'Can sperms feel pain?' Now that's an answer nobody knows the answer to...." -- J. L. "The Making of QI".) I'm an American who grew up loving the fact that I share my name with Alan Turing, but Alan Davies is one of the close runner ups (Alda, Rickman, Shepard, and steamboat preservationist engineer Alan L. Bates).

Sitting in chairs made of woven grass.

Up shit creek without a paddle

Even worse off, because our ancestors would likely not have evolved into primates. We would be small creatures living in holes in the ground, like the Juramaia.

bobalina Probably without a boat as well.

Aoderic Perhaps not. Other plants such as ferns, palms, succulents, cacti, etc could and would have evolved to fill the broad niche that trees fill. So although evolution on Earth would have been drastically different, it's possible that humans (or more accurately some loosely analogous species) could still have evolved.

Stephen's face is priceless

Mr. Jeremiah Software 😂

".....so disappointing."

"Software was invented in 1998 by Mr. Henry Software." - Little Britain, probably

I'm struggling not to laugh out loud in public!

I was waiting for a punchline here, but it sounds like you're serious. So "house, with attached knitting factory"?

Do you really think they'd be "fabricating" the story for a thumbs up?@@Brasswatchman

@@ravenhendershott1058 I never said -- oh. OHHHH. 😆

Oo, blue whale!

it's an act.... he was told to act stupid to be relatable but it's annoying

would be far more entertaining (and people like him) if he went ham for a change... but alas, broadcasting conformity dictates his pay.

@@nriab23 He does have slightly slurred speech most of the time but that could have many causes.

I think u might b on to something

All those blue whale withdrawal...

Heck if I know

Whoa, I felt so high reading this.

From Britannica.com: "The term was coined to differentiate these instructions from hardware-i.e., the physical components of a computer system. A set of instructions that directs a computer’s hardware to perform a task is called a program, or software program."

I think originally hardware is practical items. Like tools, ingredients or building blocks/materials. Software is information instead. Like blueprints, recipes or texts. The software is usually the instructions to the hardware. In computing the hardware is the tool while the software is the instructions for the usage of the tool. The terminology probably dates back to when computer where programmed at the spot by the use of code on paper or punching cards. When you design software you do not change anything with the hardware. You just write code. Then the code is compiled/translated over to the hardware.

@@falconx50 p

Well, I wasn't _planning_ on starting one, but you've already changed my mind, Clippy.

Never thought to see a Superhero Movie joke on this video but okay lol

This is not meant as a personal criticism DJ, but society today seems to believe that unless something wasn't thought of/invented/developed in their life time it must be rubbish and be replaceable with something newer and better. That's just not true. Very often "improvements" use more resources or create more pollution.

@@MKR5210 So true! Some people seem to think that anything invented before the 20th century is practically medieval.

@@MKR5210 'Society' doesn't believe any such thing. It isn't what DJ meant either. That machines from long ago are still in use is remarkable. That's not a put down of older technology, but rather it is a compliment. Stop making up bad stuff about people who are younger than you.

I've seen one of those Jacquard portraits, I think in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, next to the patent model for the loom that made it. Both are exquisite objects. It's so weird to think that we still have digital images, rendered in thread, from the 1700s. Then the near computer revolution of the 1830s, and then damn near nothing more impressive for 100 years.

Just so typical that Jacquard is scarcely remembered and Ada Lovelace steals all the credit.

Erik Harker don’t you mean Crysis

I suppose it would need a couple hours to weave a frame, and you would need to add extra bits for the control logic, but in theory it's possible

Jacquard Doom?

I always liked Wolfenstine 3D better.

Thats all nice and good, but can you open a second tab on chrome with it?

Was that police chief called Clancy Wiggum, by any chance?

@@GedMaybury23 no names!

Back in the DOS era, someone in my department was changing the programmable keyboards to type "DEL *.*Y" when a specific key was hit (different every time).

@@Dudemon-1 Worse: Back in the DOS 1.0 era ----you had to buy your hard drive from an alternative maker, IBM wasn't even making a hard drive but made the only PC. You spent a long time working with floppy (I mean FLOPPY) drives. And you needed to FORMAT each one. However, if you keyed FORMAT with no drive letter, it defaulted to C: Several times I forgot to key FORMAT A: and my C: drive began to be reformated. Fun times.

@@oldcougar65 -- Oh, no! Yeah, I remember those days, too, and I think I made that error once.

Ahh

No, that appears to come from "clay"

No, because it isn't true. The research on this show is pretty bad.

No, but in a just universe, that's totally where it ought to have come from.

Yes, as nobody has ever thrown jam into a printer.

Thanks!

You can hear him read Mythos, his own novel on Classical Mythology

Can’t wait for the next installment, Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Forward

Is it so called because it takes him a leap year to explain one point?

Have you yet discovered Taskmaster? They're now putting full episodes on KZfaq.

Same here bro!! It’s the best!!

Hope you've discovered Would I Lie To You and 8 Out Of 10 Cats :)

Judging by your profile picture I am amazed it wasn’t sooner.

Same here. I never knew any of the shows on Brit TV and all of a sudden WILTY showed up. If you haven't seen it yet, a good starter episode to watch is "Mitchellian rants and outbursts". They are logical, reasoned and funny as hell. I've not seen them all yet but so far all the episodes of Would I Lie To You have been great.

What's even more amazing is that early miniature steam engines were built by an inventor named Hero who lived in Alexandria around 10-70 AD. He built them using earlier descriptions of such devices, but they were only really seen as a novelty and not scaled up. He also made the first vending machine, which was a device that dispensed a dose of holy water when you put a coin into a slot at the top of it, after which the coin dropped into a basket, and the lever it had pushed down sprang back up for the dispenser to be used again.

I hate to nit pick but the earliest looms were not steam driven. They were manually powered.

A friend of mine is an engineer, and he basically invented a device that would automatically cut off high-voltage circuits during a surge - then on again once the system was safe. (Siemens bought him out) Anyway, as I expressed my admiration he quickly stopped me. He said, very simply: "I was already standing on the shoulders of giants." Those giants can be traced back into prehistory. The first to fracture flint and discover a knife. The first to plant a seed.The first to scoop up and carry water in an animal skin. Waaay down that line from there was Issac Newton, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Hedy Lamarr, Richard Pearse ... .. and you and me. No-one is ever working alone.

100 years is a good figure, it's roughly the length of time from Babbage to the first two or three working automatic programmable digital computers.

@@GedMaybury23 Newton was the first to say he was standing on the shoulders of giants. Apparently his main rival was quite short, and Newton wanted to piss him off. Genius is no guarantee against pettiness.

This is one for a niche audience

Jeepers, SAP improved our lives no end after we switched from Ellipse

My bet would have been Excel

Fifa

"Old Jebediah Software!"

@@nunyanunya4147 someone* else's* grammar* spelling*

@Hell Bro shalom i forgive you too

@Hell Bro Fascinating. And, well, weird.

*vicar.

You obviously didn’t learn the first time, then.

Yeah they managed to fit the history of computing, the history of textiles, the origin of two different words, and some good ol' fashioned Lord Byron(he shows up so often he should have his own segment) all in one question!

One might even say it was quite interesting.

you may say it was quite interesting

unfortunately wrong : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage

I disagree I zoned out.

He also came up with “Mr Software” 😂

Perunavallankumous Probably not the first, actually - one of the regular jacquard patterns probably received that honour.

Also, the looms weren't computers, they didn't have memory and couldn't do any calculations (they just happened to use punch cards, which were later adopted for computers).

@@RFC3514 Punch cards are totally ROMs

@kricku - So are books. That doesn't make them computers. Unless a machine can follow instructions to store data and use it later (either for other calculations or for flow control - i.e., to decide _which_ part of the program to execute next), it's not a computer in the modern sense of the word. Incidentally, Babbage never actually made (or even finished designing) a computer. The Difference Engine (which he never built but did design) was just a fixed-function calculator. His "computer" would have been the Analytical Engine, but that never came close to existing, and was basically forgotten. I'd still acknowledge him as the first CPU architect (and Ada Lovelace as the first software engineer, with some credit to Luigi Menabrea, whose work she used as a starting point), but only in a chronological sense. The first actual functioning mechanical computers were developed independently from their work.

With Alan there to divert the conversation randomly, every so often.

Buy his audiobooks

@@krishnajain4391 Does Fry have audiobooks on history/science?

@@sohamdas He's not much of a scientist, but he is obsessed with Greek mythology. His Mythos series is great.

@@sierraromeoromeo2444 'you're simple' - but yes, it is really annoying that people can't be a bit more imaginative, instead of endlessly regurgitating the same 'meme' type comment formats. The hackneyed 'legend has it', or 'nasa called, they want their computer back', or 'I'm a simple man...', or 'that moment when....'. Everything has to be a meme nowadays.

Boondock I liked your comment then unliked it because, although I find the majority of the statement to be true for me, I’m a woman. I need to like all of something to click like 😆

@@tjfSIM Dont forget the "Me: I think this", "Someone: blah blah blah", "Me: witty remark". Meme culture has got everyone thinking theyre a comedian when the truth is, knowing when to stop milking it is what makes a great comedian.

@@3allz You're absolutely right. I can't add anything to that, you hit the nail on the head :)

@@sierraromeoromeo2444 I like you.

Do you not speak French?! I thought the French education system was a good one.

When English stole the word from French, we also stole the documentation, no wonder you didn't know!

According to Wikipedia the word sabotage does come the shoe, sabot, but not because disgruntled workers threw them in to machines but rather from the noise and clumsiness associated with the shoe

It is a French word, after all.

@@petejammo88 and any jerk can mess with Wikipedia's information base. That error has undoubtedly been corrected a couple of times in the past, and will be again.

The problem is the explanation is not true. Honestly, one could assume that even thinking about it. Shoes used to be expensive, no way people would waste them throwing them at anything.

@@TheTambourinist TVs are also expensive, but people get mad at stuff and break them too.

@@TheTambourinist In the 1700s wooden shoes - sabot - were worn by the poor working class. As such they were not expensive and were often made by the wearer themselves or a family member. However, the saboteurs - ie the workers wearing sabot - irreprably damaged the looms by means other than throwing their shoes. Throwing a shoe into the works would only temporarily disable a loom.

Hell yeah, me too, love me some Star Trek and VI is a good one, after the mess that was V.

Making your hardware unusable for far longer than it makes it work for you.

Well most of the time. Often the panel are too busy trying to crack a million and one jokes to actually pay attention to the relevance of what he's saying

@@shestewa6581 especially alan when he has a toy or device to play and act the fool with... i.e voodoo doll. annoying prick

Archie Scriven Gives an entirely new meaning to ‘left, right, left, right’ hehehe

Did you realize that it's spelled "sabot", since you're so fluent? There is so much wrong with this sentence, but I thought this was the part that should be corrected.

@@Punnikin1969 how embarrassing

Archie Scriven Except… a sabot is not a shoe, it is specifically a wooden clog type of footwear. Footwear is a generic term but shoe is quite specific in the range of items it describes. A wellington boot is an item of footwear but it is not a shoe.

Would not want be hit by a clog at 1000 m/s. That could spoil even quite a good day.

Probably easy to catch too, hard to run in 1 clog!

Not if they distroyed two looms.

@@syedmohsin18 'this factory has a clog policy -- anybody caught with bare feet shall be hanged...'

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There are .many people in the world who still use manual looms, ie no punched cards, on a commercial basis. There are MANY people in the world who are not as spoiled as those in 'developed' countries. They don't have the finances to rush out and buy the 'latest model' of ANYTHING. While they are struggling to put food on their table a 'middle man' will buy their product for peanuts and sell it to the privileged people of the 'developed' countries for an exorbitant mark up. And the privileged people in one day will throw away more food than the underprivileged worker will have in one week.

Makes sense, they stopped making floppy disks a long time ago but blank card stock is forever: this civilization is never going to stop manufacturing it.

This *is* a career in trivia literature. He just puts it everywhere else, too.

SpicyTunah Brilliant comment ! Best I’ve read all day.

*Klaxon*

No oddly. Clogge is a middle English word meaning "lump of wood". To stop cattle from straying farmers would attach wood to their feet; or to put it another way, clogged up. Which is also why clogs, wooden shoes, are called such in English

Jallen That is quite interesting

Jallen thank you, that was informative AND quite interesting ;)

Slightly related info, in Dutch the clogs are called klompen. One clog is a klomp. A klomp is also a chunk of something, usuall rounded up, like a klomp (or homp) clay or a klomp hardened fat or other materials. It's a bit oldfashioned though, today's youth would've wrecked the sentence and gone; 'Eh..that's like...a lot of..a pile or something, of claystuff.'

+Widdekuu91 i.e., "clump" in English.

On line two there, is a syntax er-ror!~ You'll be debugging that shit! for! ever!~

@TheBravesirobin Nice!

“Love lace” ... heh.

not only a matter of price, clogs are just far more practical when walking through marshlands

Wooden shoes were common in parts of England. They are cheaper and easier to make and more durable than leather or cloth. They can be made by even a semi-skilled (for the times) 'handyman'.

That open button shirt 😍

but he's in his 40s

@@nriab23 he looks pretty good for someone in his 40s then

"Stone was all my old dad ever needed..." -- Mitchell and Webb: "Bronze Orientation"

@@AlanCanon2222 I remember that one 😂

I think he means on like a proper scale. Not for the fun of it and because it's interesting.

@@RubenTheCartographer we were still using card jacquard Axminster looms to weave carpet commercially in 2001. Then we converted the last of the looms to electronic jacquard. Very labour intensive and gradually all moved offshore.

there is no line between them. trivia is knowledge.