I’m sure, by now you have used a computer be it to play games or write apaper. But do you know how a computer works and runs all the programs you whatit to? Well if not I will tell you. To begin with I will explain a little aboutthe history about the computers history. About 50 years or maybe a little longersomeone came up with the thought that all the boring stuff like math could beautomated so humans would not have to do it all. Hence the computer, as to whoexactly I could not tell you. That person than began to work with his Idea andfigured out that if he could turn a machine on and off at a specified time for aspecified time he could in a way alter what it could do. To turn it on and offhe came up with a very interesting way, he used a sheet that looked almost likea 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 0sturned it off. With this knowledge he began to make little programs that couldsolve math problems. I guess he must have gotten bored with the math orsomething because he came up with a way to let him play tic-tack toe with thecomputer, 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 computerwas half the size of West High Schools gym. And it was thought that when it wasecomoical 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 youput your TV? But with the invetion of keyboards and nanotechnology they reducedthe size of the computer by nearly 200% and every year the keep getting smallerand smaller and it is estimated that nearly 85 to 90 percent of American homeshave at least one computer in their home. Now that I have bored you to death with the history of computers here’sthe fun stuff. Programs that let you play games and surf the net aren’t just ideas putin a niffty little box and sold. They are ideas put on paper then translatedinto a really, really huge math problem that the computer can understand, afterall the computer was invented to do math problems, by people called programers.
From there the computer further translates the math problems into 1s and 0swhich in turn translates into the image you see on the computer screen. And allthis is stored on a little thing called a hard drive. Now before I go to farinto depth on this topic, imagine a city block with excatly 1000 houses on itand every house can only store so much, so when that house fills up the housenext it the last one fills up and being the nice people they are let thecomputer pull any thing it needs out of the houses to use and when its done withthe stuff it puts it back in the same house. The process described above is whatmakes up a hard drive.
