Under the Cabinet Bluetooth Radio Computers, Electronics, Office Supplies, Computing

Our last episode brought us to the start of the 20th century, where early, special purpose computing devices, like tabulating machines, were a huge boon to governments and business - aiding, and sometimes replacing, rote manual tasks. But the scale of human systems continued to increase at an unprecedented rate. The first half of the 20th century saw the world’s population almost double. World War 1 mobilized 70 million people, and World War 2 involved more than 100 million. Global trade and transit networks became interconnected like never before, and the sophistication of our engineering and scientific endeavors reached new heights – we even started to seriously consider visiting other planets. And it was this explosion of complexity, bureaucracy, and ultimately data, that drove an increasing need for automation and computation. Soon those cabinet-sized electro-mechanical computers gr