History of Science & Technology Q&A (November 30, 2022)

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Can you give some insight into automata theory, its history and its applications up until today? - How did scientists figure out the source of the cosmic microwave radiation? - Why didn't containers become popular until Docker around 2013? It seems like they would have been very useful long before that. What did people do instead? - The idea of containers was there, but it was virtualization plus a heavy load of scripts to manage servers and configurations, which was just another iteration of mirroring machines. - Apple also had a Motorola-to-PPC emulator for their PPC Macs.