DAI 227 Week 1

The Machine That Changed the World

1) How was unique about Charles Babbage Analytical Engine, compared to his original Difference Engine?

     The Analytical Engine was programmable with punch cards, while the Difference Engine was not. This enabled the Analytical Engine to do a limitless number of computations.

2) What role did Ada Lovelace play in the development of the Analytical Engine?

     Ada Lovelace enrolled herself as Babbage's interpreter to the world at large after seeing a test piece of the Analytical Engine. She also gave enthusiastic support to Babbage. She was known as the first computer programmer for her detailed notes on Babbage's engine.

3) How was the ENIAC computer reprogrammed?

     The ENIAC computer was reprogrammed by rewiring the hundreds of different cables since it could not store its program inside.

4) Name an innovation that helped make programming faster post ENIAC (see ep. 2)

     The transistor is the innovation that helped make programming faster. It replaced the vacuum tube since it was smaller, more powerful, and projected much less heat.

5) What is it about binary counting that makes it so well suited to computers?

     It only has two numbers: 0 and 1. These two numbers alone can produce just as many different possibilties as sets of ten and they can be represented very simply by a switch of on and off.

6) In what ways did UNIVAC influence the portrayal of computers in popular culture in the 1950s? Give an example. (see ep. 2)

     At first no one beileved that computers were capable of predicting and calculating. One example is the calculation of Eisenhower winning by a landslide. CBS did not believe it and stated so on public television. However, when the machine successfully calculated the landslide win UNIVAC caught everyone's attention and people started believing in the capability of computers.

7) Codebreaking required the automatic manipulation of symbols to unscramble messages during WWII.

What was the name of the rudimentary computer at Bletchley Park in England that unscrambled Nazi codes.
     The name of the computer was Colossus

8) Alan Turing who understood the implications of such machines later went on to describe them as __________ machines.

     Alan Turing describes them as computing machines


General Questions

9) Describe when you first used computers and what types of tasks you performed on them.

     When I first used computers I played around with simple programs such as the paint and the games that came with most computers. I remember playing solitaire and composing horrid pictures at first but in a couple years I started using it for more specific purposes. My papers in elementary and middle school were typed with Microsoft Word and amateur presentations were made with Powerpoint. Whenever there was a computer game available I would play that on the computer as well.
     Now that I am older I am using the internet to conduct research for massive essays and soon I will be using Adobe Creative Suite 4 to do classwork. In addition to mandatory work I also use the computer for the internet and all its glory. Online social networks and more games can be found online.

10) How restricted do you think computers are in terms of what they can do compared to how they are most often used?

     The computers are not very restricted. Of course, social networking and status updates does not seem very complex but the process behind it must be very intricate. First of all, people must be connected in order to instantly transmit random information. The computer enables people to communicate within seconds and manages to do so on a massive scale. The whole world is very demanding of the computer, and while the majority of the public may not be working on programs for computers they still require the computer to do tasks that seem impossible.