computers are amazing By Deleted (Read 711 times)

[Deleted]

this video shows the inside of an old EPROM chip like those used in older car ECM's. look at how complex it is and think of how complex the processor in your computer now must be!

[Deleted]

also-

[jct842]

A little over 50 years ago the first electronics course I took consisted of 1440 hours of instruction yet only touched on solid state diodes. Talk about some thing snowballing. While sophomore in high school a senior and honor student I knew built a computer, it consisted of about 10 vacuum tubes and he was the subject of a large article in the biggest newspaper in the state. I saw the first hand held calculators and you could buy a nice new car for what one cost then. While in the navy I saw my first real computer, It had dozens and dozens of huge reels of magnetic tape spinning first one direction then they reversed, there must have been maybe 30 or 40 cabinets of them. That whole computer today could probably be replaced by a smartphone small enough to smuggle into prison in a body cavity!

[Bashan]

What freaks me out is no moving parts. With the new solid state drives and no moving parts fans, soon the whole machine will not have a moving part. How does a machine that complex not have moving parts? I just can't wrap my head around that. Rich

[Guitarman]

It does have moving parts. Hundreds of billions of them. We call them 'Electrons'. We move them instead of the machine itself because it's much more efficient that way.

I started off waaaay early. My Dad was General Manager of NCR's Ci-Meg division. Everyday after school I'd head over to his office and ride home with him. I'd hang out in the lab and they put me to work. By the time I was 8 I was doing bus structure repairs with a soldering iron. By age 12 I spoke assembler pretty fluently. Next came FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, BASIC, and a few others. After the Army, I had a computer biz for 24 years. I woke up one day in a cold sweat screaming "PLUG THE DAMN THING IN YOU IDIOT!". My loving wife and the Doctor both strongly suggested a career change. So I went back in the gym for a couple of years and taught martial arts and got my music chops back in shape.
Now, I'm one of 'those' guys that used to be on the edge and has slowed down to teaching the next generation how to freak us out with new sounds. I'm so sorry to my fellow seniors... Use earplugs.


The first computer I personally had was an Altair 2000 (I think it was called that) and I had to assemble it myself. The output was 8 red lights on the front panel. You reprogrammed it by re-wiring it to an extent. LOL Boy was it state of the art back then. LOL

[cyborg]

geez i make my living with stain and hair brushes using 16th-17th century techniques ,,,i'm kinda out of the loop by a few centuries,,,,

[Guitarman]

That's Ok Cyborg. We still let the old geezers in the clubhouse. After all, how much can you really drink before you need to use the bathroom?

[Bashan]

Cyborg? A lot....a freaking lot. Still Andy, look at what John said, the old pooters had reels buzzing back and forth and the originals clicked and clacked like Robbie the robot. They were moving electrons but they were doing it with switches. And I know about the capacitors being switches, but still, there's a flat brick of a SSD and it doesn't buzz or hum. At least the HDDs whine like a HS girlfriend. It just makes me feel more at home to know something, even to a small degree, is actually moving in a computer. And I work on them, I got three in the shop right now! I take them apart and think "there should be more moving in here....like a cam...where's the damn cam?!"

[jct842]

this is a small sampling of what the usn had

[royldoc]

Jul 9, 2014 20:27:39 GMT -6 Bashan said:

Cyborg? A lot....a freaking lot. Still Andy, look at what John said, the old pooters had reels buzzing back and forth and the originals clicked and clacked like Robbie the robot. They were moving electrons but they were doing it with switches. And I know about the capacitors being switches, but still, there's a flat brick of a SSD and it doesn't buzz or hum. At least the HDDs whine like a HS girlfriend. It just makes me feel more at home to know something, even to a small degree, is actually moving in a computer. And I work on them, I got three in the shop right now! I take them apart and think "there should be more moving in here....like a cam...where's the damn cam?!"

I don't know about any cams. A few years back (probably more than a few) I ran across a program that takes the cpu usage and turns it into a tachometer signal through a comm port. It was pretty cool watching the needle in the tach mounted on top of the tower bounce around as the cpu usage went up and down. I still have that tach set up.

Roy

[Guitarman]

Rich, Know how a transistor works?

Think of a door on the input side of a waterwheel. Open the door, water comes in. The more open the door, the more water, the faster the wheel turns. A transistor is the door. Pull on this side, (by sending electrons to it) and you pull the lever on the door. Only this door has 2 positions. Full open and fully closed.

So, if you have 10 Billion transistors, then you have 10 billion little doors inside the machine. Imagine them all flipping open and closed really fast. That would tend to generate a lot of heat. Hence the need for fans in the case.

Capacitors are more like dams. They hold back the juice until it tops the dam and then it's all let go at once. Then the dam closes again and waits till the power hits the threshold limit again.

[Bashan]

So you've got 10 billion little doors opening and closing and you don't have a problem with wrapping your head around that? You can put that stuff in analogies all you want and it is still an incomprehensible amount of events occurring in an incomprehensibly short amount of time. I accept that it happens, I know how the components work together, I know how to straighten them out. But to say you truly grasp what is happening at that level, the interplay of the CPU and it's cores with the N and S bridge, even though you know the concept of capacitors and binary, is a stretch.

[cyborg]

it's all zeros and ones to me,,,kinda like greek in a fuked up mad scientist way,,,i'll stick with my brushes,,,