Computers

The book I read to research this post was The Computer A Very Short Introduction by Darrel Ince which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book gives a kind of general overview of computing and its history and various technologies. A very early which was in a universitie's computer science department cost $29,000 and had a 128kb of memory and had to have instructions entered on punch cards as well as a keyboard. This computer was also the size of a room. The owner of Intel came up with a law in 1965 that still holds true today. It states that the fastest available speed of processor doubles every 2 years. Interestingly the owner of IBM thought the world would only need 5 computers at any one time. It's estimated that a typical family in the USA has 30 computers if you include all the computer controlled devices they possess like dvd players, electronics in a car & even a computer keyboard has a tiny computer built into it separate to the computer it is connected to. A recent creation is the beowulf cluster, these are supercomputers with lots of ordinary processors that are much cheaper than a single super powerful processor that will fit in a suitcase and typically cost around $2,500. These computers usually run linux and are normally used on computer networks. There has been a supercomputer called Deep Blue that famously beat Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion at chess. In the future we are likely to see more computer controlled devices and the computers will get smaller and items like televisions and fridges which are just to be connected to the internet ie for automatically ordering food and entertainment will become more integrated.