The power of computers

Author: Florian Bouquet

Before the 1940’s, each machine computed for one accurate task, that was not very convenient while we have many work to achieve. It was not until these years that it stopped. Nowadays, our computers can compute everything we want, as long as it is expressed as numbers.

However, the tiniest of operations in a computer consists in manipulating in base 2, whose digits can be only 0 or 1. Thus, computers are very fast in their calculations. The most important is not what these numbers are but what they represent for us, and that’s the real power of computers. It’s the british mathematician Ada Lovelace who made this discovery while studying what the analytical engine of Babbage, which is a Victorian, large and non-electronic trial, will become later. As a matter of fact, the concept of universal language she imagined allows us today to compute whatever we want.

The object you can see above is the analytical engine built by Charles Babbage. His first plan was to create a high powered mathematical calculator, but Ada Lovelace realized that a machine can manipulate not only niumbers, but also other things they stand for.		This machine, the PDP-8 minicomputer, was, in its time, the first successful minicomputer which has aver existed Before it, in 1965, the computers were excessively large, occupying entire rooms. This change allowed offices and laboratories to have their own computer, because it didn’t take too much place. Fundamentally, if computers are just fast calculators, the numbers they manipulate represents what we have chosen for them. Thus, computer software can be used to model and test virtually anything, according to our needs.