If anyone wants to get a deeper understanding of the Apollo Guidance Computer I can recommend the book "Digital Apollo" by David A. Mindell. It puts the AGC into the context of the fly-by-wire efforts that started with airplanes and moved on to spacecraft.
The book "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" by Frank O'Brien is also good and goes into more technical detail. I'm told he gets a few things wrong, but it's a generally good treatment. There are several videos on YouTube that discuss the AGC at various levels of detail, including the excellent series by CuriousMarc where he and his team restore an AGC into working order, an astonishing accomplishment.
In Fred Hoyle’s science fiction novel, The Black Cloud, there is a computer in an early chapter that is clearly inspired by EDSAC. When they run a program on it, the process is just what you describe - they load a paper tape in through the tape reader, which Hoyle describes in detail.
I first read that book before I knew that in British English a vacuum tube is called a valve (from thermionic valve and which makes more sense than the American term, I think), so I was confused by the line about how warm the room was due to all of the valves!
Valve gear is particularly full of transatlantic differences, as well as valves vs tubes in many cases the same specific valves can have different names depending on the side of the Atlantic you're on such as EL84 vs 6BQ5. Your high voltage line is called HT in British but B+ in American, while what we'd call an anode in the UK is more commonly called a plate in the US. I'm not sure if it's as fixed but I've usually heard Americans calling what I'd call the heater the filament as well.
While 'valve' makes more sense from the point of view of what it does, 'tube' makes more sense from the point of view of what it is I think.
We called them thermionic valves too, just the terminology shifted a bit over time. We also called capacitors "condensers". Both were references to steam powered control systems.
They say the term did not originate from the steam condenser. Quite the opposite, it became deprecated because of the ambiguous meaning of steam condenser.
What I'm reading (and was told by grey beards) is that it originated as a metaphor to steam condensers, and was deprecated because the two different systems having the same term led to ambiguities. Including the fact that they do have different properties, such as steam condensers are able to absorb steam pressure, but can't actually return the steam when the input pressure drops back down (since it's already been condensed back into water).
I rewatched this series a few years ago and was surprised that it held up as well as it did. Yes, lots of sexism, but not untypical for that time. Like Star Trek, it had women in authority roles, but also in sexy outfits, so a bit of a mixed bag. They also got handsome Michael Billington out of his shirt a few times, which I found quite interesting for reasons that didn't become clear to me until some years later :)
Space:1999 started as a sequel to this series, set ten years later, on a greatly expanded Moonbase. They eventually abandoned that connection.
The opening credits theme music and editing are just brilliant.
Skimpy clothes can be stylish too. I don't really know of a modern TV series that goes that route anymore. So many things died - look at Married with children, the first five seasons. Such jokes are simply no longer made. It's strange how the world changed.
On youtube I recently had tons of auto-censoring where f*ck was removed in the audio with a bleep silent sound, but in the subtitles or in-titles, it was spelled out just fine. I hate censorship.
As for sexism, well - a male audience is more interested in certain elements. How high was the female audience percentage? Most probably were bored by the repetitive nature of that series. Always UFO and aliens. Dallas on the other hand, as TV show, had more elements, so a wider range of people were interested in it.
There's an entire industry of women's fiction made entirely of improbably bulging and muscular men (as seen on the cover, sometimes headless) with limitless drive and passion (as described, in physiological detail, in the text.)
Being dutifully concerned about miniskirts in a 60s TV show seems a little quaint in 2026.
That aside - UFO was originally sold as a show for kids, in the tradition of its predecessors, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, which were hugely popular.
The weirdness wasn't the sexy dresses - which were designed by the wife half of the co-production team - it's that it was clearly an adult show about adult themes with some toy franchise branding mixed in.
Some of the themes are still progressive today, like the episode about unconscious racism.
It was of its time, but so are most things, including the things being created and talked about today.
I was looking at IKEA's home automation stuff, some of which uses the name TRÅDFRI and I thought the "FRI" part sounded like "free" and sure enough this just means "wireless". I'm guessing the "TRÅD" part is possibly a cognate of English "thread", so "thread free" is a literal translation. (I don't speak Swedish so forgive me if I'm completely off on this.)
English and Swedish have tons of similar words since they are closely related, as do most Germanic languages. The older a word is, the more similar it usually is.
The book "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" by Frank O'Brien is also good and goes into more technical detail. I'm told he gets a few things wrong, but it's a generally good treatment. There are several videos on YouTube that discuss the AGC at various levels of detail, including the excellent series by CuriousMarc where he and his team restore an AGC into working order, an astonishing accomplishment.