Computers

A common misconception about computers is that they are smarter than humans. Actually, the degree of a computer№s intelligence depends on the speed of its ignorance. Today№s 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 today№s computers was nothing like the machines we use today. The first known computer was Charles Babbage№s 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 Babbage№s 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 today№s 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) (Today№s average home computer can hold roughly 20,480 times this amount.)

Today, the chip-based computer easily packs the power of more than 10,000 ENIACs into a silicon chip the size of an infant№s fingertip. (Reid 64) The chip itself was invented by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce in 1958, but their crude devices looked nothing like the sleek, paper-thin devices common now. (Reid 66) The first integrated circuit had but four transistors and was half an inch long and narrower than a toothpick. Chips found in today№s PCs, such as the Motorola 68040, cram more than 1.2 million transistors onto a chip half an inch square. (Poole 136)

The ENIAC was an extremely expensive, huge and complex machine, while PCs now are shoebox-sized gadgets costing but a few thousand dollars. Because of the incredible miniaturization that has taken place, and because of the seemingly "magical" speed at which a computer accomplishes its tasks, many people look at the computer as a replacement for the human brain. Once again, though, the computer can only accomplish its amazing feats by breaking down every task into its simplest possible choices.

Of course, the computer must receive, process and store data in order to be a useful tool. Data can be text, programs, sounds, video, graphics, etc. Some devices for entering data are keyboards, mice, scanners, pressure-sensitive tablets, or any instrument that tells the computer something. The keyboard is the most popular input device for entering text, commands, programs, and the like. (Tessler 157) Newer computers which use a GUI (pronounced gooey), or Graphical User Interface, utilize a mouse as the main device for entering commands. A mouse is a small tool with at least one button on it, and a small tracking ball at the bottom. When the mouse is slid across a surface, the ball tracks the movement on the screen and sends the information to the computer. (Tessler 155) A pressure-sensitive tablet is mainly used by graphic artists to easily draw with the computer. The artist uses a special pen to draw on the large tablet, and the tablet sends the data to the computer.

Once the data is entered into the computer, it does no good until the computer can process it. This is accomplished by the millions of transistors compressed into the thumb-nail sized chip in the computer. These transistors are not at all randomly placed; they form a sequence, and together they make a circuit. A transistor alone can only turn on and off. In the "on" state, it will permit electricity to flow; in the "off" state, it will keep electricity from flowing. (Poole 136) However, when all the microscopic transistors are interconnected, they have the ability to control, manipulate, and move data according to the condition of other data. A computer№s chip is so ignorant, it must use a series of sixteen transistors and two resistors just to add two and two. (Poole 141) Nevertheless, this calculation can be made in just a microsecond, an example of the incredible speed of the PC. The type of chip mainly used