Before we get onto that topic, I want you to watch this YouTube video, and once you read the article you’ll understand why.
{% youtube 9e5bzd-rXKQ %}
Now imagine this ball machine, created by Jelle Bakker to be a computer. A computer starts to work when electricity passes through it, now let me first explain to you to concept of electricity, and then we get to the context of that ball machine and computers.
Technically there are only 3 things that really exist. Protons, neutrons and electrons. Nothing more. Combined these form atoms and these atoms can be bound to other atoms to form molecules, and these molecules form substances and mixtures and even entire living organisms. Now I’ll simply it all, but this is what it comes down to.
Neutrons have no charge. Protons have positive energy, and electrons have negative energy. Positive energy attracts negative energy, and thus the protons pull the electrons to themselves, but the more protons, the more electrons will come, and so a “stream” of electrons will get on. Hence the Dutch name “stroom” for electric energy, as it literally means “stream”.
Now back to this ball machine. Imagine the floor to be the protons and the balls to be the electrons. The protons (the earth) attracts the electrons (the balls) and so the balls will simply try to find the lowest spot in the ball machine. However some pins and stuff are different every time causing the balls the take a different route every time. And some different effects also happen along the way. But the way this particular ball machine is set up also causes each switch to have only setting 1 or setting 2, or channel is open, or channel is closed. Perhaps you get the global idea now.
Now when the first electric computers came to be, they too only understood 1 and 0… true or false…. yes or no… it all comes down the the same thing, are electrons flowing through certain elements or are they not. The first programmers of the world were a group of women who had to kinda get into the computer and to place in or remove metal tubes, so electricity can pass through the tube, or not pass through it, similar to how Jelle placed in obstacles or walls or floors or tracks to ‘program’ the course the balls can take, so in fact he’s a kind of programmer as well, but in stead of a real computer he programmed his ball machine. Computers today still work in the same fashion, although this is terribly hard to believe given their size. Heck a smart phone can do more than the first computer ever could… well, in end result as all it does is the same as the original computers, it’s only smaller, and faster and has more memory and thus more effects are possible.
We all owe that one to the invention of the microchip.
Now, I gotta note, in the picture above, only that small square thing in the middle of the circle is the actual chip, all the rest is only to make it possible to easily plug it in, and to connect it to other chips or stuff or whatever. It’s thanks to this invention that the computer technology we know today is possible and for that we need to thank the German engineer Werner Jacobi, British radio engineer Geoffrey Dummer for the concept and in the end Harwick Johnson for bringing us the first prototype. And that is when computer technology truly began. But in the end, all the chip does is being a ball machine allowing balls (electrons) to pass through to to deny passage causing all these funny effects, but as we got a highload of very very tiny tracks hardly recognizable and even impossible to see with the human eye, tons of electrons can pass through, and now all combinations of 0s and 1s, causing all kinds of openings and closings for other 0s and 1s making them all end up in a different place, the combinations gets us our current possibilities and since there are so much not a single human soul knows were every electron is going, and thanks to modern compilers nobody needs to know, as we can be sure everything works…. It’s like when Jelle’s ball machine would cover the surface of the sun and be much higher and processing a billionfold of the balls the machine has now, that can thanks to modern technology happen in a small device you can just hold in your hand. It’s crazy…. It goes beyond imagination…. and it’s downright incredible that computers still do nothing more than passing zeros and ones, or rather making electrons flow through channel 1 or channel 2 or stop them completely, just because of how other electrons did flow….
It’s downright spooky ;)
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