Monday, January 16, 2012

The Computer

Is it just me or does the keyboard look like it has a smiley face?

Alright fellow bloggers and readers, for our first post I figure I'll start with something that we all know and love...The Computer! If you don't know what this is I need you to contact me right away so I can figure out how you're reading this. So, starting off..


Did you know that...

1. A Computer is designed to carry out sequences of mathematical and logical operations. In short, every computer program from the website you're looking at to the game you are playing is made via math!

2. The very first digital computers were developed in the mid-20th century, around the second World War (in the early 40's). They filled up entire rooms AND consumed as much electricity as several HUNDRED desktop computers do today. Did I mention that it only had a couple of kilobytes of storage. That's about 1/1000 the storage of a 1GB iPod while taking up about 100,000 times more physical space.

3.  The very first computing device of any kind of was created by Joseph Marie Jacquard who modified a textile loom, used for making cloth, to use a series of hole-punched paper cards. Using these cards, Jacquard could tell this textile loom what he wanted done, i.e. "program" it, albeit in a very limited manner.

4. Binary is the basic language of computers, consisting of series of 1's and 0's to represent words, letters, etc. 010010000110010101101100011011000110111100101110 ("Hello!")

5. Computer "bugs" simply refer to computer programing that is illogical, incomplete, etc. and therefore cause the computer not to work as intended. The phrase was coined back when the very first computers were made of a series of tubes and a moth accidentally got caught inside one of them, causing the unit to malfunction.

Curse you Microprocessors!
6. Hard-drives space refers to how much stuff you can save on a computer. Memory refers to how much information your computer's can process at once.

7. Hardware refers to the actual physical computer (or Terminator). Software refers to the programs on it (i.e. the desire to kill all organic life-forms).

8. Computers will eventually rise against us. It's true, go watch the Movies!

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I hope that this has been enlightening and interesting little examination of The Computer. If you have any particular interests, helpful comments, or even if you just want to talk about what you had for lunch: Let us know! Hopefully we will be giving the site an overhaul soon to give it a more amiable appearance. See you tomorrow!

5 comments:

  1. Nice trivia. Interesting to see how far computers have come.

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  2. I would still like to think the machines will not eventually rise up against us.

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  3. Maybe you should clarify that it isn't literally 1s and 0s, but rather a bunch of switches turned "on" or "off" to represent those 1s and 0s.

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  4. Hopefully we'll be cyborgs by the time they rise up.

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