By pragyansharma polavarapu
The word computer is on every lip. The thing computer too is everywhere—with students, in homes, laboratories, shops, supermarkets, hotels etc. We pay all bills through the computerized counters. It is inside the digital camera,digital watch,digital phone ,in the friz,in TV and in music player ! It is on the jet plane and space rocket . Finally the great news is that even the small wrist worn computers have arrived.
There are surprises galore .Suppose a person called on the phone the friend living in a neighboring house and the call broke off suddenly. But the call will be connected by the digital phone to your friend via a wireless channel via China Russia and America! How you may ask. If there is an internet connection in the house you can use computer/digital phone to communicate with a person in any country by voice channel or video channel. The world has entirely changed .It is as if all the world has become contracted into a village of lanes and bye lanes. Human race is blessed with a new boon by Nature. They are given a power to talk with an invisible person living in another corner of earth and can even see that other person’s moving picture.
Suppose a person typed the poem “Twinkle,Twinkle ,Little star!” in a WORD program screen on a computer .We can enlarge the letters to very big or very small size or to very fat or very lean shape or change their color all in a second. We can attach photo clips, video clips or music clips.
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Suppose we have to copy a 10 page essay from a note book in real world to another note book (also in the real world). The person who is given that work frets and fumes and feels irritated and agrees to complete it only by following day or in another two days. Instead, suppose we gave the task to a computer-- to copy a 10 page essay of “ file A” in the computer to “file B” in the same computer or “file C “ in a computer on next table or in another city or another country . For the computers it is a work of one second . Even if the file A were in a computer in a faraway city or a faraway country , if there is internet connection in your house, you can copy that matter into file B in any computer in the world in a second.
Nowadays studios take photos and give a print in a few minutes. They may even help in obtaining a copy of photo existing in a computer in another country and hand it over to you in minutes! (But be careful about the password). All these are real great technical wonders .
Greater wonders follow .The very first “ancient computers”(used by US army and US and European universities) were unwieldy giants with 15,000 thermionic tubes ( small bulbs with hot filaments inside).Each such computer required an air- conditioned hall to accommodate the 10 or 15 cabinets of electric parts . Each such giant was really only a mathematical calculator perhaps a thousand times less powerful than a modern pocket calculator .The old giant computers costed a million dollars each as against cost of modern pocket calculator coming for less than 5 dollars .
But we always show the greatest respect to good old giant-sized computer machines as they proved the genius of great electrical engineers and mathematicians to create mathematical and logic circuits using flowing electricity . The old bulky computers could calculate in a split second a trajectory to send a rocket to destroy in the sky an already airborne enemy rocket coming from 2000 miles. Such giant machine could prepare salary bills of 10,000 employees or print answer sheets of 10,000 students in an hour or two. We salute the inventors.
Now we talk of the wonder of wonders. Let us compare the sizes of the old and new computers. The modern desktops/laptops/I pads/ digital phones—(and also all the computerized gadgets like shop counter machine/the tv/the digital camera/ the washing machine/the friz/electronic toys etc) ---all contain in them a silicon chip which is wonderful creation of science . It is a “microprocessor” of the size of a shirt button.
The chip contains a few hundred thousand interconnected sub-microscopic “ transistors” creating a most powerful computer system and also vast electronic memory(i.e. a data storage area) . Each such silicon chip is in fact a self-contained tiny computer. Each chip contains hundreds of thousands of inter-connected transistors . The great wonder is that “each submicroscopic transistor in the chip” is equal in power to “one thermionic tube” the hot filament glass bulb in the ancient computer!
Now what about “speed” and “patience” of a computer . After a person sits for a long time of typing /writing / counting work he gets tired and even short tempered . Not so the computer . It never gets tired or short tempered. It can do non-stop for an hour a million basic calculations like 5+2, 4x2 etc. What is wonderful and unbelievable is the fact that its digital brain completes all the million calculations in a second ! Only the printing process takes hours! The computer never gets tired and never commits mistakes .If the electrical connections are not good it just stops but does not commit mistakes. It gives always 100% correct answers. The mistakes if any detected are done only by humans handling the computer .
What is the meaning of a software program ?imagine an expert cook in a hotel. The manager sends all ingredients to prepare a particular dish—wheat flour,sugar, ghee, spices and nuts. The cook has the “software” in his brain . After an hour out comes the sweet cakes with great flavor and taste. The ingredients are the INPUT. The prepared sweet cakes are the OUTPUT . The special skills of the cook is the SOFTWARE. The cook is the equivalent of the COMPUTER .
Finally a very serious universal truth. The aim of first electrical engineers and mathematicians was to make the stream of electrons flowing in metal wires (at speeds near to 300,000 kilometers per second) to do mathematics. Every computer treats every problem in its digital brain only interms of numbers---(1,2,3,4…. etc), (+,-,x,/,square,cube,square root ,cube root …etc), (<,>,= ,not equal, yes/no ) etc etc.
NB:These articles on computers –(and a a few more to be published)---are written to remove the view of people that computer is a mystic object. Being a physics graduate ever interested in physics,mathematics,electrical science and computer theory I wrote these articles just for pleasure. I read computer science books and numberless computer science articles on the net. They are all so interesting and gave me an idea that I should write. Physics,mathematics and computer (ex:pascal language) are sharp and accurate.
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