Computers
- Date Submitted: 01/28/2010 06:29 AM
- Flesch-Kincaid Score: 57.9
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A common misconception about computers is that they are smarter than
humans. Actually, the degree of a computer¹s intelligence depends on the
speed of its ignorance. Today¹s complex computers are not really
intelligent at all. The intelligence is in the people who design them.
Therefore, in order to understand the intelligence of computers, one must
first look at the history of computers, the way computers handle
information, and, finally, the methods of programming the machines.
The predecessor to today¹s computers was nothing like the machines
we use today. The first known computer was Charles Babbage¹s Analytical
Engine; designed in 1834. (Constable 9) It was a remarkable device for its
time. In fact, the Analytical Engine required so much power and would have
been so much more complex than the manufacturing methods of the time, it
could never be built.
No more than twenty years after Babbage¹s death, Herman Hollerith
designed an electromechanical machine that used punched cards to tabulate
the 1890 U.S. Census. His tabulation machine was so successful, he formed
IBM to supply them. (Constable 11) The computers of those times worked
with gears and mechanical computation.
Unlike today¹s chip computers, the first computers were
non-programmable, electromechnical machines. No one would ever confuse the
limited power of those early machines with the wonder of the human brain.
An example was the ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.
It was a huge, room-sized machine, designed to calculate artillery firing
tables for the military. (Constable 9) ENIAC was built with more than
19,000 vacuum tubes, nine times the amount ever used prior to this. The
internal memory of ENIAC was a paltry twenty decimal numbers of ten digits
each. (Constable 12)...
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