ADVENTURE OF THE MIND

e [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] n [Music] [Music] I did it it again I balance my checkbook once a month and when I check the figures in the hand calculator everything comes out fine then I copy it into my checkbook wrong what I need is something that will do all this busy work for me you know that's what people dreamed of over a century ago a machine that they could give a problem to and the instructions on how to solve the problem and then just sit back and wait for the answer by the 17th century the need for an adding machine was felt by those who labored over even the most basic accounting task as a young man of 20 the Great mathematician blz Pascal labored hour upon hour over simple addition while helping in his father's tax office this is a replica of the adding machine that Pascal built it works like the indicator on your car when you add one number to another it carries over into the next column the goal was not only to provide speedy and accurate answers but also to relieve the tedium of endless hours of repetitious calculations well you see we don't spend much time today with arithmetic on a daily basis we have some homework to do and there's some money matters now and then but for some people a few centuries ago it was what they did day after day I don't mean just a few mathematical Geniuses I mean everyday people whose jobs were as boring and dreary as the most repetitious physical labor these people literally spent their lives adding subtracting multiplying and dividing to fill tables of numbers for use by astronomers Navigators surveyors engineers and scientists these tables were so important that governments like the French and English set up production teams of people to execute various stages of a complex calculation that would result in just one entry into a single table in the early 1800s an eccentric Englishman by the name of Charles babage convinced the English government to give him a large Grant to develop a machine that would solve a certain type of complex problem now while his concept for the machine was Innovative work went slowly and was never finished because in the early 1800s the craft of metal working was really too primitive for his concept now this is the modern reconstruction right here of babbage's early design you can see the complex interaction of these [Music] gears in 1833 babage had an exciting idea a general purpose machine that would solve a wide range of problems it would be a machine that when given a package of instructions would automatically proceed to solve the problem and it would remember any subtotals and preliminary results needed to calculate the final answer well what resulted was a design for what babage called his analytical engine it'd be nice to see this reconstruction work but babage intended it to be powered by a huge steam engine and there just aren't any of those available what we still can do though is point out the five components that make this so unique in the same way modern computer cards are used metal cards like this contained data and instructions for the steps babbage's machine was to follow by means of a coded pattern of holes once an ordered number of these cards was inserted into the input section of the machine a controlled sequence of events would happen without a human having to intervene so the operator could just wait for the answer this heavily geared area is what we call the arithmetic logic section of the machine the part that would do the actual calculations temporary results from part of a large calculation were stored in the pattern these memory rods were placed in by action of the gears so that the number stored in a pattern could be used by the machine later to finish the problem and finally the answer was directly printed out so that nobody could make a mistake while copying it from the machine more than a century later and these five elements are still the most important components of a modern Computing system memory output input control and arithmetic logic and this might be the first time you toured a computer center this large but I'll bet you already know which piece of equipment is which let's see here's a keyboard similar to one you might find on a typewriter it's used for entering data or instructions into the computer it's part of one of these component systems can you guess which one input that's right if we have a computerized payroll the input system is the means by which we input information into the computer about how much time we worked or who new employees are the instructions that we gave the computer through its input system are interpreted by this unit over here that controls and sequences all the operations of these machines it literally tells the computer what to do next step by step according to what you the programmer tell it to do well I guess the word's pretty self-explanatory the control unit actually controls what the computer does now to keep that payroll system that we were talking about up to date the computer has to do some calculations like totaling the number of working hours or deducting taxes fringe benefits and so on and that is the unit that does it behind these covers is the component that performs those computations and it also performs logical operations Well you certainly can't tell from looking at it but I bet you can figure out from my description that it contains the arithmetic logic component of this computer system these computer components over here store data and instructions and hold them until we are ready to use them here's a magnetic tape mass storage device that's part of a component system system that can store literally millions of pieces of information such as our names our social security numbers the salaries of days we were sick and so on now when the rest of the computer needs this kind of information it'll come here to get it this also stores the instructions that tell the computer how to process this information well obviously this is a memory component and there are other memory devices like like these magnetic disc packs individual discs are placed on top of each other like a stack of Records but with space in between so that playback heads can read any part of each disc surface finally we want to get our answers and results out of the machine and we can do this by a series of peripheral devices that are all part of the computer's output system now this is a hard copy printer that can spew out what we want to know very quickly or if we don't need it printed on paper here's a video screen that can give us the same information oh there's one more thing I'd like to add all the components that we've talked about also have circuits located in this one big blue central processing unit that contains the arithmetic logic unit so this one large unit contains circuits that extend out to all the other equipment we've seen there's a lot of equipment in this room but Computing isn't so big that you can't get your hands on it I thought I'd show you where the hardware components are in the kind of computer that you'll be using now they're kind of hard to see because it's so small but they're all here in this area here is the arithmetic logic unit down in this area is the control component over in this area is the memory component in this area here is the input section and finally over here is the output component now if I turn this over you can see the keyboard that's tied into the input section and the video screen over here is tied into the output section of this computer that's already assembled now all this Machinery that we've seen is called Hardware it's the hard physical part of computing but this Machinery can't do anything until we instruct it what to do and it's these instructions or programs that are called software it's the stuff that comes from our mind that tell the machine what to do the equipment is Hardware the instructions that we give it is software now I'm just about finished up typing a software program that I'd like you to see what you see on the screen here is application software instructions I'm giving the computer to perform a specific job to work on a specific application that I wanted to work on I'm working out some statistics for my basketball team I have the players totals but I want a list of their percentages and averages over the entire season you can see from what I've typed in so far that I'm instructing the machine with a very special language or code that's very similar to English for instance the words print input and read mean to the computer exactly what they mean to us you can also see that these software instructions are numbered the machine carries out each instruction according to its number therefore numbering is very important now of course the machine isn't carrying out my instructions yet it's just letting me list them on the screen until I'm ready to use them so now I'll type in the instruction run and we can actually run the program what what do you mean what oh I misspelled the word run so the computer tells me that it couldn't understand my instruction it's a simple language but everything has to be precise no misspellings you see inside the memory component of this machine is stored a set of instructions that does a number of things it's called the system software as you can see it tells me when I make mistakes that way the machine just doesn't sit there when it doesn't understand what I tell it to do and I don't sit here like a dummy wondering why it's not working the system software enables the machine to tell me when I make a mistake it also interprets and translates the words I type into a form the machine understands so the application software is the instructions that I give the machine to solve my problem to handle my particular application the system software interprets my instructions for the hardware and locates any faults and also generally runs and manages the system now let's correct my misspelled instruction and see what happens when I run the [Music] program there you see it computed and listed all the percentages I needed and so if I wanted to do all the other players percentages I could could put their basic statistics into the program too so now you know all about the hardware components of the computer the arithmetic Logic the control the input the memory and the output you also know about the two software components that is the application software that's the instructions that you give the machine to solve your particular problem and also the system software those instructions already in the machine that run the system and interpret what you tell it so the next time you get your hands on a computer remember these are the components that make the whole thing work for you [Music] [Applause] n [Music]