Finance          Automotive          Computers          Health          Shopping          Sports         News          Reference           Print Facts in English - BCUZ.COMlos hechos en Español

Computer



As the use of computers has spread throughout society, there are an increasing number of careers involving computers. Following the theme of hardware, software and firmware, the brains of people who work in the industry are sometimes known irreverently as wetware or "meatware".

Computer-related professions
Hardware-related Electrical engineering, Electronics engineering, Computer engineering, Telecommunications engineering, Optical engineering, Nanoscale engineering
Software-related Computer science, Human-computer interaction, Information technology, Software engineering, Scientific computing, Web design, Desktop publishing

The need for computers to work well together and to be able to exchange information has spawned the need for many standards organizations, clubs and societies of both a formal and informal nature.

Organizations
Standards groups ANSI, IEC, IEEE, IETF, ISO, W3C
Professional Societies ACM, ACM Special Interest Groups, IET, IFIP
Free/Open source software groups Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Apache Software Foundation

See also

Look up Computer in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:


Notes

  1. ^ In 1946, ENIAC consumed an estimated 174 kW. By comparison, a typical personal computer may use around 400 W; over four hundred times less. (Kempf 1961)
  2. ^ Early computers such as Colossus and ENIAC were able to process between 5 and 100 operations per second. A modern "commodity" microprocessor (as of 2007) can process billions of operations per second, and many of these operations are more complicated and useful than early computer operations.
  3. ^ Heron of Alexandria. Retrieved on 2008-01-15.
  4. ^ The Analytical Engine should not be confused with Babbage's difference engine which was a non-programmable mechanical calculator.
  5. ^ B. Jack Copeland, ed., Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, Oxford University Press, 2006
  6. ^ This program was written similarly to those for the PDP-11 minicomputer and shows some typical things a computer can do. All the text after the semicolons are comments for the benefit of human readers. These have no significance to the computer and are ignored. (Digital Equipment Corporation 1972)
  7. ^ Attempts are often made to create programs that can overcome this fundamental limitation of computers. Software that mimics learning and adaptation is part of artificial intelligence.
  8. ^ It is not universally true that bugs are solely due to programmer oversight. Computer hardware may fail or may itself have a fundamental problem that produces unexpected results in certain situations. For instance, the Pentium FDIV bug caused some Intel microprocessors in the early 1990s to produce inaccurate results for certain floating point division operations. This was caused by a flaw in the microprocessor design and resulted in a partial recall of the affected devices.
  9. ^ Even some later computers were commonly programmed directly in machine code. Some minicomputers like the DEC PDP-8 could be programmed directly from a panel of switches. However, this method was usually used only as part of the booting process. Most modern computers boot entirely automatically by reading a boot program from some non-volatile memory.
  10. ^ However, there is sometimes some form of machine language compatibility between different computers. An x86-64 compatible microprocessor like the AMD Athlon 64 is able to run most of the same programs that an Intel Core 2 microprocessor can, as well as programs designed for earlier microprocessors like the Intel Pentiums and Intel 80486. This contrasts with very early commercial computers, which were often one-of-a-kind and totally incompatible with other computers.
  11. ^ High level languages are also often interpreted rather than compiled. Interpreted languages are translated into machine code on the fly by another program called an interpreter.
  12. ^ Although this is a simple program, it contains a software bug. If the traffic signal is showing red when someone switches the "flash red" switch, it will cycle through green once more before starting to flash red as instructed. This bug is quite easy to fix by changing the program to repeatedly test the switch throughout each "wait" period—but writing large programs that have no bugs is exceedingly difficult.
  13. ^ The control unit's rule in interpreting instructions has varied somewhat in the past. While the control unit is solely responsible for instruction interpretation in most modern computers, this is not always the case. Many computers include some instructions that may only be partially interpreted by the control system and partially interpreted by another device. This is especially the case with specialized computing hardware that may be partially self-contained. For example, EDVAC, the first modern stored program computer to be designed, used a central control unit that only interpreted four instructions. All of the arithmetic-related instructions were passed on to its arithmetic unit and further decoded there.
  14. ^ Instructions often occupy more than one memory address, so the program counters usually increases by the number of memory locations required to store one instruction.
  15. ^ Flash memory also may only be rewritten a limited number of times before wearing out, making it less useful for heavy random access usage. (Verma 1988)
  16. ^ However, it is also very common to construct supercomputers out of many pieces of cheap commodity hardware; usually individual computers connected by networks. These so-called computer clusters can often provide supercomputer performance at a much lower cost than customized designs. While custom architectures are still used for most of the most powerful supercomputers, there has been a proliferation of cluster computers in recent years. (TOP500 2006)
  17. ^ Most major 64-bit instruction set architectures are extensions of earlier designs. All of the architectures listed in this table existed in 32-bit forms before their 64-bit incarnations were introduced.

References




BCUZ.com FACTS Encyclopedia content is licensed under the GFDL as approved by Wikipedia.
For more information review our copyright contact and privacy policy.
© 1996 - BCUZ.COM - We have all the FACTS you need about Small Business Financing, Behavior Disorder, Having Too Many Bills, Needing Cash Fast, Structured Settlements, Frequent Flier Programs, Top Steak Houses, The Mayan Indians, Norfolk and Suffolk England, Growing Longer Hair and a full reference English Encyclopedia and Spanish Encyclopedia.Privacy Policy