Computers | Gentle Reading For Sleep

Relax with calm bedtime reading about computers to ease you into sleep when insomnia keeps the mind busy. This calm bedtime reading for sleep gently explains computers in a way that softens racing thoughts and offers comfort for insomnia and restless nights.

Tonight, Benjamin reads about the fascinating world of computers, what they are, how they work, and how they became part of everyday life. As the facts unfold slowly and simply, you can learn a little about technology while your mind gradually unwinds. His steady, soothing cadence makes it easy to listen without effort, letting the information drift by like a quiet late night documentary for your ears.

So press play, settle in, and let this peaceful exploration of computers carry you toward rest. Happy sleeping!

Transcript

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast, Where I help you drift off one fact at a time. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster, And today's episode is about computers. A computer is a machine that can be programmed to automatically carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations, Computation. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations, Known as programs, Which enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks. The term computer system may refer to a nominally complete computer that includes the hardware, Operating system, Software, And peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation, Or to a group of computers that are linked and function together, Such as a computer network or computer cluster. A broad range of industrial and consumer products use computers as control systems, Including simple, Special-purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls, And factory devices like industrial robots. Computers are at the core of general-purpose devices, Such as personal computers, And mobile devices, Such as smartphones. Computers power the Internet, Which links billions of computers and users. Early computers were meant to be used only for calculations. Simple, Manual instruments like the abacus have aided people in doing calculations since ancient times. Early in the Industrial Revolution, Some mechanical devices were built to automate long, Tedious tasks, Such as guiding patterns for looms. More sophisticated electrical machines did specialized analog calculations in the early 20th century. The first digital electronic calculating machines were developed during World War II, Both electromechanical and using thermionic valves. The first semiconductor transistors in the late 1940s were followed by the silicon-based MOSFET, MOS transistor, And monolithic integrated circuit chip technologies in the late 1950s, Leading to the microprocessor and the microcomputer revolution in the 1970s. The speed, Power, And versatility of computers have been increasing dramatically ever since then, With transistor counts increasing at a rapid pace. Moore's Law noted that counts doubled every two years, Leading to the digital revolution during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Conventionally, A modern computer consists of at least one processing element, Typically a central processing unit or CPU, In the form of a microprocessor, Together with some type of computer memory, Typically semiconductor memory chips. The processing element carries out arithmetic and logical operations, And a sequencing and control unit can change the order of operations in response to stored information. Peripheral devices include input devices, Keyboards, Mice, Joysticks, Etc. , Output devices, Monitors, Printers, Etc. , And input-output devices that perform both functions, E. G. Touchscreens. Peripheral devices allow information to be retrieved from an external source, And they enable the results of operations to be saved and retrieved. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, The first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, In a 1613 book called The Young Man's Gleanings by the English writer Richard Bracewaite. I have read the truest computer of times, And the best arithmetician that ever breathed, And he reduced thy days into a short number. This usage of the term referred to a human computer, A person who carried out calculations or computations. The word continued to have the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century. During the latter part of this period, Women were often hired as computers because they could be paid less than their male counterparts. By 1943, Most human computers were women. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the first attested use of computer in the 1640s, Meaning one who calculates. This is an agent noun from compute, Verb. The Online Etymology Dictionary states that the use of the term to mean calculating machine, Of any type, Is from 1897. It also indicates that the modern use of the term to mean programmable digital electronic computer dates from 1945 under this name, In a theoretical sense from 1937, As Turin Machine. The name has remained, Although modern computers are capable of many higher-level functions. Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, Mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting device was most likely a form of tally stick. Later record-keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi, Clay spheres, Cones, Etc. , Which represented counts of items, Likely livestock or grains, Sealed in hollow, Unbaked clay containers. The use of counting rods is one example. The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was developed from devices used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BCE. Since then, Many other forms of reckoning boards or tables have been invented. In a medieval European counting house, A checkered cloth would be placed on a table, And markers moved around on it according to certain rules, As an aid to calculating sums of money. The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest known mechanical analog computer, According to Derek J. De Sola Prize. It was designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, Between Kithra and Crete, And has been dated to approximately 100 BCE. Devices of comparable complexity to the Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until the 14th century. Many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for astronomical and navigation use. The planisphere was a star chart invented by Abu Rehan al-Biruni in the early 11th century. The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd centuries BCE, And is often attributed to Hipparchus. A combination of the planisphere and dioptra, The astrolabe, Was effectively an analog computer, Capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy. An astrolabe incorporating a mechanical calendar computer and gear wheels was invented by Abi Bakr of Isfahan, Persia, In 1235. Abu Rehan al-Biruni invented the first mechanical-geared lunisolar calendar astrolabe, An early fixed-wired knowledge processing machine, With a gear train and gear wheels, Circa 1000 AD. The sector, A calculating instrument used for solving problems in proportion, Trigonometry, Multiplication, And division, And for various functions, Such as squares and cube roots, Was developed in the late 16th century, And found application in gunnery, Surveying, And navigation. The planimeter was a manual instrument to calculate the area of a closed figure by tracing over it with a mechanical linkage. The slide rule was invented around 1620-1630 by the English clergyman William Otred, Shortly after the publication of the concept of the logarithm. It is a hand-operated analog computer for doing multiplication and division. As slide rule development progressed, Added scales provided reciprocals, Squares, And square roots, Cubes and cube roots, As well as transcendental functions, Such as logarithms and exponentials, Circular and hyperbolic trigonometry, And other functions. Slide rules with special scales are still used for quick performance of routine calculations, Such as the E6B circular slide rule, Used for time and distance calculations on light aircraft. In the 1770s, Pierre Jacques Droz, A Swiss watchmaker, Built a mechanical doll automation that could write holding a quill pen. By switching the number and order of its internal wheels, Different letters, And hence different messages, Could be produced. In effect, It could be mechanically programmed to read instructions. Along with other complex machines, The doll is at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Neuchâtel, Switzerland, And still operates. In 1831-1835, Mathematician and engineer Giovanni Plana devised a perpetual calendar machine, Which, Through a system of pulleys and cylinders, Could predict the perpetual calendar for every year from 0 CE, That is, 1 BCE, To 4000 CE. Keeping track of leap years and varying day lengths. The tide predicting machine, Invented by the Scottish scientist Sir William Thompson in 1872, Was of great utility to navigation in shallow waters. It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide levels for a set period at a particular location. The differential analyzer, A mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, Used wheel and disc mechanisms to perform the integration. In 1876, Sir William Thompson had already discussed the possible construction of such calculations, But he had been stymied by the limited output torque of the ball and disc integrators. In a differential analyzer, The output of one integrator drove the input of the next integrator, Or a graphing output. The torque amplifier was the advance that allowed these machines to work. Starting in the 1920s, Vannevar Bush and others developed mechanical differential analyzers. In the 1890s, The Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo began to develop a series of advanced analog machines that could solve real and complex roots of polynomials, Which were published in 1901 by the Paris Academy of Sciences. Charles Babbage, An English mechanical engineer and polymath, Originated the concept of a programmable computer. Considered the father of the computer, He conceptualized and invented the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century. After working on his difference engine, He announced his invention in 1822 in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society, Titled Note on the Application of Machinery to the Computation of Astronomical and Mathematical Tables. He also designed to aid in navigational calculations. In 1833, He realized that a much more general design, An analytical engine, Was possible. The input of programs and data was to be provided to the machine via punched cards, A method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms, Such as the Jacquard loom. For output, The machine would have a printer, A curve plotter, And a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. The engine would incorporate an arithmetic logic unit, Control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, And integrated memory, Making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. The machine was about a century ahead of its time. All the parts for his machine had to be made by hand. This was a major problem for a device with thousands of parts. Eventually, The project was dissolved with the decision of the British government to cease funding. Babbage's failure to complete the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to political and financial difficulties, As well as his desire to develop an increasingly sophisticated computer and to move ahead faster than anyone else could follow. Nevertheless, His son Henry Babbage completed a simplified version of the analytical engine's computing unit, The mill, In 1888. He gave a successful demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906. In his work Essays on Automatics, Published in 1914, Leonardo Torres-Caveiro wrote a brief history of Babbage's efforts at constructing a mechanical difference engine, An analytical engine. The paper contains a design of a machine capable to calculate formulas like a to the power of x times the quantity y minus z squared for a sequence of sets of values. The whole machine was to be controlled by a read-only program, Which was complete with provisions for conditional branching. He also introduced the idea of floating-point arithmetic. In 1920, To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the arithmometer, Torres presented in Paris the electromechanical arithmometer, Which allowed a user to input arithmetic problems through a keyboard and computed and printed the results, Demonstrating the feasibility of an electromechanical analytical engine. During the first half of the 20th century, Many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated analog computers, Which used a direct mechanical or electrical model of the problem as a basis for computation. However, These were not programmable and generally lacked the versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers. The first modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine invented by Sir William Thomson, Later to become Lord Kelvin, In 1872. The differential analyzer, A mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration using wheel and disc mechanisms, Was conceptualized in 1876 by James Thomson, The elder brother of the more famous Sir William Thomson. The art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the differential analyzer, Completed in 1931 by Vannevar Bush at MIT. By the 1950s, The success of digital electronic computers had spelled the end for most analog computing machines. But analog computers remained in use during the 1950s in some specialized applications, Such as education, Slide rule, And aircraft control systems. Claude Shannon's 1937 master's thesis laid the foundation of digital computing, With his insight of applying Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits being the basic concept which underlies all electronic digital computers. By 1938, The United States Navy had developed the torpedo data computer, An electromechanical analog computer for submarines, That used trigonometry to solve the problem of firing a torpedo at a moving target. During World War II, Similar devices were developed in other countries. Early digital computers were electromechanical. Electric switches drove mechanical relays to perform the calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and were eventually superseded by much faster all-electric computers, Originally using vacuum tubes. The Z2, Created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1939 in Berlin, Was one of the earliest examples of an electromechanical relay computer. In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3, The world's first working electromechanical programmable, Fully automatic digital computer. The Z3 was built with 2, 000 relays, Implementing a 22-bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5 to 10 hertz. Program code was supplied on punched film, While data could be stored in 64 words of memory or supplied from the keyboard. It was quite similar to modern machines in some respects, Pioneering numerous advances, Such as floating point numbers. Rather than the harder-to-implement decimal system used in Charles Babbage's earlier design, Using a binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, Given the technologies available at that time. The Z3 was not itself a universal computer, But could be extended to be Turing-complete. Zuse's next computer, The Z4, Became the world's first commercial computer. After initial delay due to the Second World War, It was completed in 1950 and delivered to the ETH Zurich. The computer was manufactured by Zuse's own company, Zuse KG, Which was founded in 1941, As the first company with the sole purpose of developing computers in Berlin. The Z4 served as the inspiration for the construction of the Ermuth, The first Swiss computer and one of the first in Europe. Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical equivalents, At the same time that digital calculation replaced analog. The engineer Tommy Flowers, Working at the Post Office Research Station in London in the 1930s, Began to explore the possible use of electronics for the telephone exchange. Experimental equipment that he built in 1934 went into operation five years later, Converting a portion of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data processing system, Using thousands of vacuum tubes. In the U. S. , John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed and tested the Atanasoff-Berry computer, ABC, In 1942, The first automatic electronic digital computer. This design was also all-electronic and used about 300 vacuum tubes, With capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for memory. During World War II, The British codebreakers at Bletchley Park achieved a number of successes at breaking encrypted German military communications. The German encryption machine, Enigma, Was first attacked with the help of the electromechanical bombs, Which were often run by women. To crack the more sophisticated German Lorenz SC40-42 machine, Used for high-level army communication, Max Newman and his colleagues commissioned Flowers to build the Colossus. He spent 11 months, From early February 1943, Designing and building the first Colossus. After a functional test in December 1943, Colossus was shipped to Bletchley Park, Where it was delivered on January 18, 1944, And attacked its first message on February 5. Colossus was the world's first electronic digital programmable computer. It used a large number of valves, Vacuum tubes. It had paper-tape input, And was capable of being configured to perform a variety of Boolean logical operations on its data, But it was not Turing-complete. Nine MK-II Colossi were built. The MK-I was converted to a MK-II, Making ten machines in total. Colossus MK-I contained 1, 500 thermionic valves, Or tubes, But MK-II was 2, 400 valves, With both five times faster and simpler to operate than MK-I, Greatly speeding the decoding process. The ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, Was the first electronic programmable computer built in the U. S. Although the ENIAC was similar to the Colossus, It was much faster, More flexible, And it was Turing-complete. Like the Colossus, A program on the ENIAC was defined by the states of its patch cables and switches, A far cry from the stored-program electronic machines that came later. Once the program was written, It had to be mechanically set into the machine with manual resetting of plugs and switches. The programmers of the ENIAC were six women, Often known collectively as the ENIAC Girls. It combined the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed for many complex problems. It could add or subtract 5, 000 times a second, A thousand times faster than any other machine. It also had modules to multiply, Divide, And square root. High speed memory was limited to 20 words, About 80 bytes. Built under the direction of John Mockley and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943 to full operation at the end of 1945. The machine was huge, Weighing 30 tons, Using 200 kilowatts of electric power, And contained over 18, 000 vacuum tubes, 1, 500 relays, And hundreds of thousands of resistors, Capacitors, And inductors. The principle of the modern computer was proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936 paper On Computable Numbers. Turing proposed a simple device that he called Universal Computing Machine, And that is now known as a Universal Turing Machine. He proved that such a machine is capable of computing anything that is computable by executing instructions or programs stored on tape, Allowing the machine to be programmable. The fundamental concept of Turing's design is the stored program, Where all the instructions for computing are stored in memory. Von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to this paper. Turing machines are to this day a central object of study in theory of computation. Except for the limitations imposed by their finite memory stores, Modern computers are said to be Turing-complete, Which is to say they have algorithm execution capability equivalent to a Universal Turing Machine. Early computing machines had fixed programs. Changing its function required the rewiring and restructuring of the machine. With the proposal of a stored program computer, This changed. A stored program computer includes, By design, An instruction set, And can store in memory a set of instructions, A program, That details the computation. The theoretical basis for the stored program computer was laid out by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In 1945, Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory and began work on developing an electronic stored program digital computer. His 1945 report, Proposed Electronic Calculator, Was the first specification for such a device. John von Neumann at the University of Pennsylvania also circulated his first draft of a report on the EDVAC in 1945. The Manchester Baby was the world's first stored program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester in England by Frederick C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, And Jeff Teutel. It ran its first program on June 21, 1948. It was designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, The first random-access digital storage device. Although the computer was described as small and primitive by a 1998 retrospective, It was the first working machine to contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer. As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, A project began at the University to develop it in a practically useful computer, The Manchester Mark I. The Mark I, In turn, Quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark I, The world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. Built by Ferranti, It was delivered to the University of Manchester in February 1951. At least seven of these later machines were delivered between 1953 and 1957, One of them to Shell Labs in Amsterdam. In October 1947, The directors of British catering company, J. Lyons & Company, Decided to take an active role in promoting the commercial development of computers. Lyons' Leo I computer, Modelled closely on the Cambridge EDSAC of 1949, Became operational in April 1951, And ran the world's first routine office computer job.

Reviews

I studied early computer programming back in the mid 70’s. With keypunch cards which we’d feed into a big mainframe computer card reader. Hard to believe! Thanks Ben!