COMPSCI 105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Stepped Reckoner, Blaise Pascal, Jacquard Loom
6 Sep 2016
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First half of the lecture: introductions going over the syllabus and course website. Second half of the lecture: history of computers. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Computers come in different forms (see answers to previous question) Computers are everywhere, integrated in our everyday lives. Incan quipu, roman abacus, russian abacus, japanese soroban, chinese abacus, binary. Sort of, most of the actions done on abaci are done by hand rather than automatically. Dug up from a wrecked ship by sponge divers. Series of gears in the internal structure. Most recent research show that this can indicate the positions of the moon and many planets, compute the time to have the olympics, etc. with the relative gear ratios. No electricity needed unlike the modern calculator. When it changes from 9 to 0 on one wheel, it automatically move the next wheel to 1 from 0. Yes, it does something automatically, programable, program (card belt) can be copied.
