I’m sure, by now you have used a computer be it to play games or write a paper. But do you know how a computer works and runs all the programs you what it to? Well if not I will tell you. To begin with I will explain a little about the history about the computers history. About 50 years or maybe a little longer someone came up with the thought that all the boring stuff like math could be automated so humans would not have to do it all. Hence the computer, as to who exactly I could not tell you.
That person than began to work with his Idea and igured out that if he could turn a machine on and off at a specified time for a specified time he could in a way alter what it could do. To turn it on and off he came up with a very interesting way, he used a sheet that looked almost like a scantron sheet but with holes and those holes where used to turn it on and off. The holes represented 1s and the noholes 0s. the 1s turned it on an the 0s turned it off.
With this knowledge he began to make little programs that could solve math problems. I guess he must have gotten bored with the math or something because he came up with a way to let him play tic-tack toe with the omputer, which by the way was the first came ever to be created on the computer. Now there is one more thing you have to know about this computer, the computer was half the size of West High Schools gym. And it was thought that when it was ecomoical for people to own there own computer it would fill a decent size room.
Could you imagine a computer filling up your entire living room, where wolud you put your TV? But with the invetion of keyboards and nanotechnology they reduced the size of the computer by nearly 200% and every year the keep getting smaller nd smaller and it is estimated that nearly 85 to 90 percent of American homes have at least one computer in their home. Now that I have bored you to death with the history of computers here’s the fun stuff.
Programs that let you play games and surf the net aren’t just ideas put in a niffty little box and sold. They are ideas put on paper then translated into a really, really huge math problem that the computer can understand, after all the computer was invented to do math problems, by people called programers. From there the computer further translates the math problems into 1s and 0s hich in turn translates into the image you see on the computer screen.
And all this is stored on a little thing called a hard drive. Now before I go to far into depth on this topic, imagine a city block with excatly 1000 houses on it and every house can only store so much, so when that house fills up the house next it the last one fills up and being the nice people they are let the computer pull any thing it needs out of the houses to use and when its done with the stuff it puts it back in the same house. The process described above is what makes up a hard drive.
