again, and we're not learning any of it, and the reason why is the wretched, wretched state of our universities that are not teaching this stuff, that are horribly biased, that do not believe in ideological diversity at all, and by the way, are way over-priced while we're at it. [laughter] prof. kengor: i'll stop there. how's that? [applause] bookshelf,on history here from the country's best-known american history writers of the past decade, every saturday at 4:00 p.m. eastern . you can watch any of our programs on our website, c-span.org/history. americanatching history tv, all weekend every weekend on c-span3. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] comcast cable partners worked with tour staff when we traveled to san jose,

california to explore its history. san jose was founded in november 1777 as california's first civilian settlement. learn more about san jose all weekend here on american history tv. >> right now, we are in the revolution exhibit at the computer history museum in mountain view california. behind me are over 1000 artifacts that tell about the history of computing, going back to thousand years. it is laid out into 19 galleries, each one focuses on a certain theme or object from the history of computing. one of those themes is real-time control. here we look at things like pacemakers for hearts. these are computer systems that must function. they're not like your laptop, which can crash once in a while and the worst is that you lose your work. if a pacemaker crashes, you die. the oldest item is a set of what are called napier's bones, small

ivory counting sticks from the 17th century. the most recent thing we have is an iphone, the first model. we are in the punchcard gallery. behind me you see a replica of an eight t 90 census machine. -- 1890 census machine. the bureau of the census had just finished the census, which requires a census to be taken every 10 years. the 1890 census was not going to be completed in time. so someone came up with a method to do this mechanically. typically way this system works was, the census taker would go out in the field and asked the usual questions, bring them back to the office, where they would be transcribed using this device, which converts the handwritten responses into machine-readable form. using this blank piece of cardboard at the top, the census

clerk punches holes in the card, which correspond to the answers in the census. what he did by doing this is create the census results and move them from human readable form to machine-readable form. once he did that, he could put the punch cards inside his senses machine, which worked by counting each of the holes in the card. this was a real success story. the 1890 census was completed in about three years even though there were millions of new immigrants and quite a few more questions. why this is important is because a company called ibm ultimately grew out of the patents and dominated computing for most of the 20th century. his punch cards, also called ibm cards, were the main way that people interacted with computers for most of the 20th century. right now, we are in the memory and storage gallery. world's firsthe

hard disk drive, invented in 1956 at ibm san jose by a team led by ray johnson, a retired schoolteacher who is good at inventing, no formal engineering training. the advantage of a hard disk was it could replace punch cards, so rather than having 100,000 cards in a drawer, you could just have one of these discs. is that youce, too, have to sort through punchcards to find the information, compared to a disk drive, you can jump directly to the information you need, so it is much faster. this device is so well made that it still functions. we have a team of volunteers who demonstrate once a week. one of the first things they noticed is that there was 60-year-old data still on the hard disk. the disk drive has not changed in basic form and we are still using them today but have a read/write head and a motor that spins around. welcome to the minicomputer gallery. these came out in the mid-1960's

and work computers that small businesses can afford. beside me is one that was advertised as the kitchen computer in a 1969 neiman marcus catalog. it cost $10,600 and neiman marcus did not sell any. part of the problem is that the program it, in this case the housewife, would have to know a numbering system and would have to be able to read in this code and also programmed the computer using these switches in that code. almost an impossible task for most people. generally you would attach a kind of keyboard to this to make it work. we have it here in this gallery to show that even though it was not practical, it shows the beginning of people thinking about putting computers in the home. we are sitting in front of a xerox alto which came out in 1972 and was revolutionary. it had a system that used a desktop metaphor of pulldown menus, it had ethernet, laserjet

printing, email, and spreadsheets and word processing in 1972. steve jobs saw this machine and was inspired to create the lisa at apple, which became the macintosh. the things that we take for granted, the desktop metaphor, garbage can, pulldown menus, icons on the mac and windows, all came from the xerox alto. there is a funny story in the history of computing where steve jobs allegedly complained to bill gates that bill gates had stolen the idea for windows from apple. bill gates responded, that is not true, we both stole it from xerox. that shows you the intellectual depth that the alto generated and which continues to affect us today and the computers we use. we are in the personal computer gallery right now, which shows the different microprocessor-based peters that were for sale --

microprocessor-based computers for sale in the 1970's and 1980's. we still use them today, but that was the heyday. the most significant one is right here, the apple one computer designed by steve wozniak and steve jobs. they sold about 120 of these, many assembled, some you could build in kit form. that is woz's signature on the top. hobbyist one was a machine, so was named that your heads, people who like soldering and connecting things to their tv. on the basis of this, steve jobs said, if we made a computer for normal people rather than nerds -- no offense -- i think we could sell a lot more. the computer that resulted was called the apple ii. apple was created by the two jobs, andzniak and be machine that put them on the

map was the apple ii, 1977, 48 kilobytes of memory -- not megabytes or gigabytes -- and provided color, unusual for the time. very few personal computers offered color. on the basis of the apple ii, apple kept itself afloat for many years. the first few years of sales of the lisa and mac were very disappointed and it was only because of the strong apple ii sales that apple was able to say in business. the apple ii remained an apple product for an astounding 17 years. a few years later, ibm joined the party. apple took out a full-page ad in the wall street journal and said, welcome ibm. seriously. the ibm pc was not the most advanced computer, but it had the very important job of legitimizing personal computers for business. until this time, most businessmen looked at these microprocessor-based computers like the apple and the commodore

as basically toys, suitable for home or education but not business. it took ibm's entry into the field in 1981 with the pc to finally put a stamp of approval and legitimacy on the pc. you could actually do business tasks using an ibm pc. , being atial strategy purveyor of mainframe systems, was to protect the mainframe at all costs. that was generating their billions of dollars in profit. a mainframe computer is literally a room sized computer filled with spinning tape drives and hard drives and people running around. the ibm pc was initially viewed as something that was connect -- something that would connect to the mainframes and only later was something to stand alone and used by an individual. we are now in the networking and web gallery. beside me we have google's first web server. at the time, google was a very small company with limited funds. what they did was build their equipment cheap.

they went to a local electronics store and bought a whole bunch of ibm pc-compatible circuit boards and mounted them to this large cabinet. the cabinet act like a search engine. if you did a google search in 1999 or 2000, there is a good chance your search went through this very machine. made outem is actually of cork board. if you look underneath all of these pc circuit boards, they are actually separated by a very thin layer of cork, like the cork in a wine bottle. that layer of cork is the only thing keeping the whole system from bursting into flames, so it is actually remarkably poorly designed in a sense. it is not safe really. nonetheless, for starting a business when you are running out of your garage or a small business, this was perfect for them. ,ne of the things we tell

especially schoolkids when they come, is that a computer is a tool like a hammer. with a hammer you can brain someone over the head or build a house. in one case, it is evil and in the other, it is great. it is the same with computers. we are seeing the human or social impact of how everyone having a computer in their pocket is affecting how we live. and there are lots of negative consequences cut -- insomnia, people feeling lonely in spite of being surrounded by cyber spuriousthe sort of friendship that occurs on facebook -- you call them friends but they are really not friends -- and the pace of life now i think is the single greatest risk to human sanity in the next 20 years or so. the desire, which we impose on ourselves seemingly, the always be on, always be responding to

text or emails are looking up websites. we don't just sit down and watch the sky anymore. >> our to her staff recently to san jose california. to learn more about san jose and other spots on our tour at c-span.org/cities to her. you are watching american history today. sunday night thank you and a wall street journal investigative reporter talks about his front page story to talk about the main street fall of wall street renegades. it was the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. >> i heard stories about this guys lifestyle for it while, i wanted to wait and see if anything else became public. about this guy. about one year later, i certain looking into his life and into

his campaign donations and his spending, what made him one of the major lobbyists. >> sunday night on q&a. recently american history tv was at the american historical association's meeting in denver colorado. we spoke to professors, authors, grad students on their research and this interview is about 15 minutes. rebecca hunt is a member of the american historical association. and your particular area of expertise is an early medicine and denver and pioneering. americaon hospitals in o, when did we start seeing hospitals? we servicing up more at the