Friday, August 29, 2008

Week 2 readings

Computer hardware: As defined in the piece, computer hardware is the hidden part of the computer. This means that it is the part that you do not see and the part that does most of the work. This is compared to "soft" ware that is "easily created, modified, or erased". I find it interesting that this piece is on wikipedia as wikipedia is a "soft" ware as it can be easily created, modified, or erased. I do think that it is interesting that most of our everyday object now contain computer hardware such as cars and ipods.

Moore's law: Moore's law is "the doubling of the number of transistors on integrated circuts every two years". The main points of the formula are the transitors per intergrated circut, density at minimun cost per transitor, and cost per transitor. The creator of Moore's law is Gordon Moore the co-founder of Intel. I agree with Moore's law as it is apparent in today's world with the increasing of computer hardware.

Computer History Museum: I was really interested in the Computer History Muesum. I looked at a couple of the exhibits but was most interested in the timeline. I was amazed that the first "computer" was made in 1939. The 200B aduio oscillator was made by Hewlett-Packard and used in Disney's "Fantasia". It is also hard to think that it took less than 64 years to go from room sized computers that do basic math problems to mirco chips that can do almost anything.

2 comments:

rjz said...

Hi Emily--
I also found the time line link to be interesting.
It is hard to fathom the size of computers then as opposed to now. It kind of puts Moore's Law into a new perspective.

Alesha said...

Emily, I also thought the prevalence of computers in objects we use in our everyday life is staggering. When we think of computers, we think of the things we do our facebook or emails on, not our washer and dryer, our tv's, or our coffee makers.