REDEFINING COMPUTERS
BY: LINCOLN NNAMDI CUMMINGS (133151009)
Noah and his three sons built the ark using gopher wood.300ft long and 200ft wide, it stood 3 stories high and was built in 55 years (Genesis 6:14-16). The Titanic on the other hand was built in 2 years and 2 months even though they a relatively the same size. So comparably, the time Noah used to build The Ark could have been used to build 27 Titanics. What caused the time usage difference was the introduction of technology. The usage of computers (by computers I don’t just mean a rectangular box connected to a system unit with a mouse and a keyboard.) made productivity rate high. The first computers were used in building the pyramid in Ancient Egypt (constructed 2630 BCE–2611 BCE). The Khufu Pyramid stands 449ft high and is 755ft in width. The over 300,000 laborers used tools such as the plumb bob (a tool similar to a modern-day crane) which made a humanly impossible task possible. Throughout history, several man-made devices such as the abacus and slide rules have been built to aid people in calculating data.
The original definition of a computer was any person who performed computation or was required to compute data as an integral part of their job. A computer is now universally defined as “a programmable “electronic device” that stores and processes data into meaningful information. In 1946, John Persper Eckert and John .W. Mauchly built the first digital computer (ENIAC) using vacuum tubes. Von Neumann designed the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) with a memory to hold both stored programs as well as data and the Conditional Control Transfer (allows the computer to be stopped and resumed at any time). The key element of Von Neumann was the Central Processing Unit. In 1948, Transistors replaced the vacuum tubes as a power source. Jack Kilby’s Integrated Circuit (built on a