Dr Peter Thorne
speaker
70 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
Dr Peter Thorne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Like they wanted us to solve crossword puzzles and things with it.
Could it solve crossword puzzles?
No.
LAUGHTER
And my wife, they said that we never turned anybody down.
So somebody would phone and say, can you ask the computer the name of an African tree starting with Z?
So she'd go off to the library and find it for them because she didn't want to disappoint them.
But the computer wasn't going to do that.
These days, if your machine doesn't boot up within 30 seconds, you're pretty upset about it, but 30 minutes was probably pretty good in those days.
It's a symbol of innovation, which I think is so important that we are an innovative nation.
And we are, but it's not recognised by the media and by the public as it ought to be.
And we're not at the end of this.
People in Australia are working on quantum computing, so who knows where that will go.
It was hard to see where computing would go at the beginning.
How can we sort of foresee the future?
So this is the console.
Around the back here.
And here is the hard drive.
I was pretty impressed.
And I guess that meeting, which would have been in the late 1950s, changed my life basically from then on.
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