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Welcome to In The Air, a wondrous Wednesday where I talk about something wondrous.
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So, today I'm going to talk about the wonders of computers, as this is computer week for me.
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So, I'm going to start with what is considered the first programmable electronic general purpose digital computer.
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ENIAC, which stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.
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It was made in 1945, so quite a number of years ago, at a cost of about 7 million dollars in today's dollars.
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It was able to calculate a trajectory in 30 seconds that took a human 20 hours.
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So, that was an extremely efficient use of one's time.
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It's size was very big, so 8 by 3 feet and by 98 feet, very big, about 1800 square feet, which is easily one to two floors of a house.
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27 tons in size, it had 18,000 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and approximately 5 million hand-soldered joints.
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Oh, this is from the Wikipedia page. I really actually know nothing about it other than the name, but I'm learning.
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It was a wonderful tool that was phenomenal. It was programmed by women. This was right around the end of World War II, so the war was consuming a lot of men.
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They used women who did a fantastic job and went without recognition for 30, 40 years.
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The women they selected came from this group of 200 women that were employed as computers at the School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, which I believe is where ENIAC was.
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Their job was to produce the numerical results of various scientific formulas that were needed by somebody or other for some project.
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So they did the number crunching, which is actually quite hard if you have to do it. Nowadays, we don't have to do it because of all these computers.
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And just quite massive. The term computer bug comes, I believe, possibly apocryphal. Essentially, they were actually literally bugs in the computer.
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It was so big that moths and so forth could get in there and mess around with things.
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The vacuum tubes that they used were big and cool. Making vacuums in a world like our own is not a trivial task.
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But eventually those vacuum tubes got replaced with transistors, which is kind of an electrical gate applying voltages and whatever across things.
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And so essentially the amount of computations that could be done was more or less related to the transistors you can fit into your area.
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And as over the past 60, 70 years, we have essentially doubled the number of transistors on a microchip every two years or so.
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This is called Moore's Law. Anyone or everyone knows that you cannot continue this forever. There is always a limit and we are probably reaching that limit.
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It has slowed down a little bit in the past 10 years, although we are still making advances.
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If you look on the Wikipedia page for Moore's Law, it has a nice little chart of the number of transistors on a microchip, I guess, plotted versus the years.
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So in 1970-ish we are talking, you know, 1000 kind of transistors at the beginning of the decade. And then it looks like by the end it was kind of getting up to 10,000 to 50,000.
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And then it just kept doubling, doubling. Let's see, in the early 2000s, which is when I felt like laptops became a reasonable thing to have.
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Looks like we had around 50 to 100 million transistors on a chip. In 2010 we had about a billion transistors on a chip.
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And, let's see, it looks like, what is that, yeah, so 1 billion, 5 billion, 10 billion, and then it kind of seems to jump to 50 trillion?
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Well, if that's true, it seems to suggest 50 trillion by the time of, well, now-ish.
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It says AMD Epic Rome. I don't know what that is. But, you know, it's quite fantastic. It's also worth a look and a read about how they actually do make these transistors and so forth.
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It's really quite wondrous what can be done now. They are bumping up against actual quantum mechanical limits of being so small and so dense.
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But essentially the smaller the transistors, the more dense they can be and the less power you need to actually, you know, transition them.
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So, this is how we can have such powerful chips in our pockets. The smartphones, our laptops are phenomenally powerful compared to 20 years ago, definitely 30 years ago, unheard of 40 years ago.
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Like, not even, you know, it's crazy, it is crazy just how far we've come on the whole chip thing.
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We've essentially reached the point where we, you know, most everyday uses of this stuff, you know, we've got what we need.
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There may be some high-end graphics stuff, probably with games that, you know, could still use some more or whatever, but, I mean, really, what we can do today with computers, it's amazing.
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Yeah, so, that is a little talk about the wonders of silicon. I personally am looking forward to Apple's release of their next laptop chipset.
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This past year they released what they call the M1 Apple Silicon for it and, you know, I haven't had it, but, you know, people have said it's quite powerful with an extremely long-lasting battery and almost no heat generation.
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It's phenomenal. It's, you know, related to all this transistor stuff. I'm sure there are other devices like that, but I'm kind of in the Apple universe, so that's what I know.
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But that was, that's kind of their low-end machines that they've done this for, so I'm looking forward to seeing what the high-end ones are going to do.
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I was hoping they would announce it this week, the Apple Developer Conference, but they didn't, so probably September, October, usually September's iPhones, October, maybe the laptops and stuff, so we shall see.
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But, yeah, it's, you know, this, I don't know, I'm just flabbergasted. It may actually pay, I'm sure there's a video somewhere of comparing the computers and the speeds and what they can do throughout the ages and you just see it and just, I mean, it's phenomenal.
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I'm old enough to still remember green monochrome computer terminals. I love the color of that green. I miss it so much.
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But, yeah, it was, you know, extremely primitive, still enticing, and now we have things that are just absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous screens, gorgeous chips and power usages and, yeah, it's just, it's just something to be wondered about.
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All right, well, I guess that's enough of my blathering on for now. I will see you when I see you.