How It Works...The Computer (1971) | Hacker News Reader

How It Works...The Computer (1971)

davidguy.brinkster.net

33 pointsbrazzy12 comments

Hi, I am a traveler from the future!

My telephone is more powerful than all the computers of your world put together.

I use this power to run a program that simulates a lighter on the screen of my phone.

Hi, I'm from superfuture and I can simulate the world of your time in my phone, except I'm still paying 40c per minute for phone calls.

And 10c per text message...while the actual cost to the operators has approached zero.

Actually in the superfuture the cost is negative; advertising based on the context of recent text messages causes the operator to make a small amount of money (about $.005) per message sent.

Hi, I'm from 1971. Is "faster, smaller, cheaper" really all we're going to accomplish in hardware architecture in the next forty years? We're pretty bored with the Von Neumann architecture and can't imagine it lasting much longer.

P.S. I told Vint Cerf about Facebook and he drilled a hole in his skull to "let the evil out." Hope that doesn't screw anything up for you guys. Ciao!

I had this book as a 5-6 year old in the mid 80s. It's easy, now, to underestimate the importance of short, high level books like these on the imagination of children.

Is there anything similar today? (That, ideally, is not 99% software or content creation focused, as most introductory computing books I've seen recently are.)

Found a copy of this at my Grans house, about a month ago. She had just picked it up at a church book club to learn more about how her (Windows 3.0) computer works :) If only we can get her to upgrade..... alas. She found it very understandable and definitely a good intro to old school computing.

I actually inherited this book from my grandfather. It's actually quite a nice book, and for the times, seems like a introduction.

I remember being pretty impressed by punch-cards for some time after I read the book--my attempts to find one at school were met with some quizzical looks though.

The first mechanical calculator was actually designed by Da Vinci not Pascal. http://aleembawany.com/articles/history-of-computers/

I'm pretty sure I can remember this from the early '70 (I was born in '65) - for some reason the bit about Analog and Digital computers stuck in my brain....

There is an interesting parallel between the 'bleeding edge' of digital computing and analog computing in the form of propagation networks.

Analog computing never really went away, each and every opamp is essentially an minimal analog computer.

Hehe, I have a 1984 book about computers, with a ZX Spectrum on the front cover. Got it from my dad. It's not in English, though.

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