More realistically, modern computers are made out of transistors made of photolithographed semiconductors.Ī central processing unit (CPU), also referred to as a central processor unit, is the hardware within a computer that carries out the instructions of a computer program by performing the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. For example, a computer can be made out of billiard balls (billiard ball computer) an often quoted example. However, conceptually computational systems as flexible as a personal computer can be built out of almost anything. Historically, computers evolved from mechanical computers and eventually from vacuum tubes to transistors. While popular usage of the word “computer” is synonymous with a personal electronic computer, the modern definition of a computer is literally “A device that computes, especially a programmable electronic machine that performs high-speed mathematical or logical operations or that assembles, stores, correlates, or otherwise processes information.” Any device which processes information qualifies as a computer, especially if the processing is purposeful.
Women as computers in NACA High Speed Flight Station "Computer Room"Ī computer does not need to be electronic, nor even have a processor, nor RAM, nor even a hard disk. Main articles: Human computer and Harvard Computers Therefore any type of computer (netbook, supercomputer, cellular automaton, etc.) is able to perform the same computational tasks, given enough time and storage capacity. The Church–Turing thesis is a mathematical statement of this versatility: any computer with a minimum capability (being Turing-complete) is, in principle, capable of performing the same tasks that any other computer can perform. The ability to store and execute lists of instructions called programs makes computers extremely versatile, distinguishing them from calculators. Logic gates are a common abstraction which can apply to most of the above digital or analog paradigms. The quantum computer architecture holds the most promise to revolutionize computing. Harvard architecture vs von Neumann architecture Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) computers
There are many types of computer architectures: “Wireless” networking, often utilizing mobile phone networks, has meant networking is becoming increasingly ubiquitous even in mobile computing environments. A very large proportion of personal computers regularly connect to the Internet to communicate and receive information. In fact, the number of computers that are networked is growing phenomenally. Initially these facilities were available primarily to people working in high-tech environments, but in the 1990s the spread of applications like e-mail and the World Wide Web, combined with the development of cheap, fast networking technologies like Ethernet and ADSL saw computer networking become almost ubiquitous. Computer operating systems and applications were modified to include the ability to define and access the resources of other computers on the network, such as peripheral devices, stored information, and the like, as extensions of the resources of an individual computer. The emergence of networking involved a redefinition of the nature and boundaries of the computer. In time, the network spread beyond academic and military institutions and became known as the Internet. The technologies that made the Arpanet possible spread and evolved. The effort was funded by ARPA (now DARPA), and the computer network that resulted was called the ARPANET. In the 1970s, computer engineers at research institutions throughout the United States began to link their computers together using telecommunications technology. military's SAGE system was the first large-scale example of such a system, which led to a number of special-purpose commercial systems such as Sabre. Visualization of a portion of the routes on the Internet.Ĭomputers have been used to coordinate information between multiple locations since the 1950s.
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