In my ever going quest to understand computers, IT, programming and logic behind all this, I keep on try different things.
Coming from the research background, I became a habitual deep learner. When I used to do research in molecular biology, I always tried to get answers to two very important questions Why and How. I mean, you can tell “What” part of any question with some exception, WHAT is always visible, WHY and HOW always remain invisible.
This habit of answering WHY and HOW is not letting me run in the field of computers and it is actually forcing me to take altogether different approaches to understand things.
When you take different approaches, your understanding gets better. For me, it is absolutely necessary to see the creation of knowledge gradually, I mean brick by brick, how things get bigger.
What do you know about COMPUTERS? What is it actually? Anything, which can compute/calculate/process data or inputs is a computer.
If the serial arrangement of wood sticks/marbles help you in calculate, that arrangement you can call a computer. An Abacus, a scratched surface of bones, yes, they all were computers of ancient times. Our very own HUMAN BRAIN falls into the same category too. To make anything a COMPUTER, we just need to give that thing an ability to compute.
Now, present day Computers are solely referred to machines, machines that have processors, memory, storage, interface to interact. But what all these components which create a COMPUTER actually doing? They are not doing anything, except computing ( The process or act of calculation). Isn’t it WOW!!!
You will say, I play games, do video chat, shares post on Facebook are all these mere calculations? Yes my friend, indeed they are. Calculations, some are big and some are small, but they all are calculations. A computer is good, better and best based totally on its ability to do calculations faster. A century and a half ago, if someone wanted to do a calculation involving 5 or 6 digit number, it used to take more than a week or month, as the computers at that time, were manually operated, they were having some rotors, drums. An operator had to move those rotors to calculate, that was the speed of calculation and Now, I just put a question mark (?) in the search box of GOOGLE and what it returned me: About 31,00,00,000 results (0.31 seconds), that’s the speed and technologists are competing over this speed also today.
….Yash