This is video number 2 - moving closer to the present, the invention of the Transistor - the building of the first electronic computers. The Switch is the heart of the computer - on or off is really all a computer can do.
Computer performance has increased exponentially since the first computers that were designed during the 1940s and 1950s.
1) How many Additions or subtractions could the Harvard Mark 1 do per second?
2) How many Division operations could it do?
Think about a modern computer which runs much faster than this - how fast is a modern computer?
When we say we are debugging our code - finding errors and making it work as we want it to we are referencing back to a dead moth!
3) what was the replacement for the mechanical / electrical relay?
Interestingly we still use relays today sometimes even though we have much more modern technology to use.
The Colossus Mk1 was the first electronic computer - But it was secret - in some text books you will not see it mentioned as the first computer because of this and because it was not American! Also it was kept a secret for many years after the war ended with not even the inventors being able to talk about it. Colossus machines were still used at GCHQ after the war as the Russians did not know that Britain had cracked the German cipher and were under the impression it was secure - so they used it!
4) What did the Colossus do?
The first general purpose computer ENIAC was built in America. General purpose because you could program it to do different things not just one task.
5) How many sums did ENIAC do in the first 10 years?
Transistors were a revolution to the whole electronics industry and definitely for computers - we still talk about the number of transistors we can get on a chip - although they are a far cry from the original ones. Modern Day transistors are less than 50 nano-Meters. That is very small.
6) Essentially what is a transistor?
We often talk about silicone chips but what are they and why silicone?
7) Why is a certain area of California called Silicon Valley ?
8) One advantage of having transistors over relays is that they are solid state.
- What does solid state mean?
Why is this an advantage?