[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The transistor does exactlywhat vacuum tubes do, but are much smaller, are much more durable,and cost far less to operate and to manufacture.By the 1960s banks,insurance companies, government agencies, and large corporationsdepended on computers to do, at a fraction of the cost, the work oncedone by hundreds of thousands of clerks.IBM dominated this marketwith such machines as the 7090, introduced in 1959.But computers remained very large and mysterious, hidden away inspecial air-conditioned rooms, tended by men wearing white coats whospoke languages no one else understood.These computers intruded notat all into the daily lives of most people.They also remained very, veryexpensive for a reason that mathematicians call the tyranny of numbers. 408 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THThe power of a computer is relative not only to the number of tran-sistors but also to the number of connections between them.If there aretwo transistors, only one connection is needed.If there are three, thenthree connections are needed to fully interconnect them.Four transistorsneed six, five need ten, six need fifteen, and so on.As long as these con-nections had to be made, essentially, by hand, the cost of building morepowerful computers escalated far faster than did their power.The solution to this problem was the integrated circuit, first devel-oped in 1959 by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce ofFairchild Semiconductor.An integrated circuit is simply a series of inter-connected transistors laid down on a thin slice of silicon by machine.Inother words, the transistors and the connections between them are man-ufactured at the same time.In 1971 Intel produced the first commercialmicroprocessor, which is nothing less than a very small computer laiddown on a silicon chip.The tyranny of numbers was broken.For while the cost of designinga microprocessor and building the machines necessary to produce it areextremely high, once that investment is made, the microprocessorsthemselves can be turned out like so many high-tech cookies, bringingthe cost of each one down by orders of magnitude.They quicklyincreased in complexity and therefore in power and speed.Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, predicted in the early days of thecompany that the number of transistors on a chip, and thus the chip scomputing power, would double every eighteen months.He proved cor-rect, and Moore s law, as it is called, is expected to continue to operatefor the foreseeable future.The first Intel microprocessor had onlytwenty-three hundred transistors.The Pentium 4, the current standardfor personal computers, has twenty-four million.As the powerincreased, the price per calculation collapsed.Computing power thatcost a thousand dollars in the 1950s costs a fraction of a cent today.Itsuse, therefore, began to increase by orders of magnitude, an increase thathas not begun to level off. A New Economy, A New World, A New War409The computer, like the steam engine, produced an economic revolu-tion, and for precisely the same reason: it caused a collapse in the price ofa fundamental input into the economic system, allowing that input to beapplied to an infinity of tasks that previously had been too expensive orsimply impossible.The steam engine brought down the price of work-doing energy; the computer brought down the price of storing, retriev-ing, and manipulating information.Previously, only human beings could do this sort of work; nowmachines could increasingly be employed to do it far faster, far moreaccurately, and at far, far lower cost.And just as the steam engine couldbring to bear enormous energy on a single task, the computer can bringa seemingly infinite capacity to calculate and manipulate information.Acomputer model of the early universe designed in the 1980s was esti-mated to have required more calculations than had been performed bythe entire human race prior to the year 1940.Computers began to invade everyday life with astonishing speed.Itwas more than sixty years between Watt s first rotary steam engine andthe coining of the phrase Industrial Revolution, but it was clear that acomputer revolution was under way less than a decade after the firstmicroprocessor was produced.The first commercial products were hand-held calculators that quickly sent the adding machine and the slide ruleinto oblivion.Word processors began to replace the typewriter in themid-1970s.And microprocessors, unseen and usually unnoted, began tobe used in automobiles, kitchen appliances, television sets, wristwatchesand a hundred other everyday items.Many new products cordlessphones, cell phones, DVDs, CDs, VCRs, digital cameras, PDAs wouldnot be possible without them.By the 1990s they were ubiquitous.Themodern world would cease to function in seconds if microprocessorswere all to fail.But while computers had become much smaller and much cheaper,they were still very difficult to use by people without considerable specialtraining.In the early 1970s the Xerox Corporation, at its Palo Alto 410 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THResearch Center, developed many ways to make computers far easier fornontechnical people to use, including the mouse and the graphical-userinterface.But Xerox was unable to develop a marketable product usingthese new concepts.Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the founders ofApple Computer, did so.When IBM entered the PC market in 1981,using an operating system developed by Microsoft, the market for per-sonal computers took off and has been increasing exponentially eversince as the price has dropped relentlessly.Today tens of millions of children and adolescents have on theirdesks, and use constantly, computing power that would have beenbeyond the reach of all but national governments thirty years ago.Theirdeveloping brains are literally being wired to use computers as anadjunct of their own intellect.Further, they have at their beck and callwhat is without question the most extraordinary machine ever devel-oped by a species with an abiding genius for machinery.A personal computer can play chess, or any other game, better thanall but grand masters; keep books; store and retrieve vast amounts ofdata; edit photographs; produce CDs; play movies; create art; and do athousand other tasks.No one who lived before the last third of the twen-tieth century would regard a personal computer that costs no more than5 percent of average annual income as anything but magic, or an elabo-rate fraud.But PCs can do still more.They can communicate.Personal comput-ers have become the portal into an entirely new but already major part ofthe human universe, the Internet [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl centka.pev.pl
.The transistor does exactlywhat vacuum tubes do, but are much smaller, are much more durable,and cost far less to operate and to manufacture.By the 1960s banks,insurance companies, government agencies, and large corporationsdepended on computers to do, at a fraction of the cost, the work oncedone by hundreds of thousands of clerks.IBM dominated this marketwith such machines as the 7090, introduced in 1959.But computers remained very large and mysterious, hidden away inspecial air-conditioned rooms, tended by men wearing white coats whospoke languages no one else understood.These computers intruded notat all into the daily lives of most people.They also remained very, veryexpensive for a reason that mathematicians call the tyranny of numbers. 408 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THThe power of a computer is relative not only to the number of tran-sistors but also to the number of connections between them.If there aretwo transistors, only one connection is needed.If there are three, thenthree connections are needed to fully interconnect them.Four transistorsneed six, five need ten, six need fifteen, and so on.As long as these con-nections had to be made, essentially, by hand, the cost of building morepowerful computers escalated far faster than did their power.The solution to this problem was the integrated circuit, first devel-oped in 1959 by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce ofFairchild Semiconductor.An integrated circuit is simply a series of inter-connected transistors laid down on a thin slice of silicon by machine.Inother words, the transistors and the connections between them are man-ufactured at the same time.In 1971 Intel produced the first commercialmicroprocessor, which is nothing less than a very small computer laiddown on a silicon chip.The tyranny of numbers was broken.For while the cost of designinga microprocessor and building the machines necessary to produce it areextremely high, once that investment is made, the microprocessorsthemselves can be turned out like so many high-tech cookies, bringingthe cost of each one down by orders of magnitude.They quicklyincreased in complexity and therefore in power and speed.Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, predicted in the early days of thecompany that the number of transistors on a chip, and thus the chip scomputing power, would double every eighteen months.He proved cor-rect, and Moore s law, as it is called, is expected to continue to operatefor the foreseeable future.The first Intel microprocessor had onlytwenty-three hundred transistors.The Pentium 4, the current standardfor personal computers, has twenty-four million.As the powerincreased, the price per calculation collapsed.Computing power thatcost a thousand dollars in the 1950s costs a fraction of a cent today.Itsuse, therefore, began to increase by orders of magnitude, an increase thathas not begun to level off. A New Economy, A New World, A New War409The computer, like the steam engine, produced an economic revolu-tion, and for precisely the same reason: it caused a collapse in the price ofa fundamental input into the economic system, allowing that input to beapplied to an infinity of tasks that previously had been too expensive orsimply impossible.The steam engine brought down the price of work-doing energy; the computer brought down the price of storing, retriev-ing, and manipulating information.Previously, only human beings could do this sort of work; nowmachines could increasingly be employed to do it far faster, far moreaccurately, and at far, far lower cost.And just as the steam engine couldbring to bear enormous energy on a single task, the computer can bringa seemingly infinite capacity to calculate and manipulate information.Acomputer model of the early universe designed in the 1980s was esti-mated to have required more calculations than had been performed bythe entire human race prior to the year 1940.Computers began to invade everyday life with astonishing speed.Itwas more than sixty years between Watt s first rotary steam engine andthe coining of the phrase Industrial Revolution, but it was clear that acomputer revolution was under way less than a decade after the firstmicroprocessor was produced.The first commercial products were hand-held calculators that quickly sent the adding machine and the slide ruleinto oblivion.Word processors began to replace the typewriter in themid-1970s.And microprocessors, unseen and usually unnoted, began tobe used in automobiles, kitchen appliances, television sets, wristwatchesand a hundred other everyday items.Many new products cordlessphones, cell phones, DVDs, CDs, VCRs, digital cameras, PDAs wouldnot be possible without them.By the 1990s they were ubiquitous.Themodern world would cease to function in seconds if microprocessorswere all to fail.But while computers had become much smaller and much cheaper,they were still very difficult to use by people without considerable specialtraining.In the early 1970s the Xerox Corporation, at its Palo Alto 410 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THResearch Center, developed many ways to make computers far easier fornontechnical people to use, including the mouse and the graphical-userinterface.But Xerox was unable to develop a marketable product usingthese new concepts.Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the founders ofApple Computer, did so.When IBM entered the PC market in 1981,using an operating system developed by Microsoft, the market for per-sonal computers took off and has been increasing exponentially eversince as the price has dropped relentlessly.Today tens of millions of children and adolescents have on theirdesks, and use constantly, computing power that would have beenbeyond the reach of all but national governments thirty years ago.Theirdeveloping brains are literally being wired to use computers as anadjunct of their own intellect.Further, they have at their beck and callwhat is without question the most extraordinary machine ever devel-oped by a species with an abiding genius for machinery.A personal computer can play chess, or any other game, better thanall but grand masters; keep books; store and retrieve vast amounts ofdata; edit photographs; produce CDs; play movies; create art; and do athousand other tasks.No one who lived before the last third of the twen-tieth century would regard a personal computer that costs no more than5 percent of average annual income as anything but magic, or an elabo-rate fraud.But PCs can do still more.They can communicate.Personal comput-ers have become the portal into an entirely new but already major part ofthe human universe, the Internet [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]