November 01, 2016 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
It takes both a Computer Scientist (mathematician and logician) and an Electronic Engineer to design a Turing Machine
It takes both a Computer Scientist (mathematician and logician) and an Electronic Engineer to design a Turing Machine
Bit as you know is portmanteau or a linguistic blend of the 2
words binary and digit and can have just 2 values 1 or 0, or yes and no.
A charge well can be present or absent and hence it can be
capitalized on to represent yes or no.
On a cathode ray screen, a bit would be represented by a flashing
dot or an unlit space on the phosphor screen.
So the memory of a tube would be determined by number of dots and
spaces that could fit at one go on the screen which technically is known as
memory density.
On average, a single Williams-Kilburn tube could store somewhere
around 1024 to 2560 bits of data.
As you can understand, a mere flash on the phosphor screen is not
equal to storage since any dot or absence of it is only transient.
The actual storage work is done by a second step of writing.
An electronic circuit called the function generator would sweep
the screen, reading or writing to the internal registers.
The location are specified as (x,y) co-ordinates.
In short, reading and writing involves electron detection or
absence (charge wells) by induction of currents and voltages using special
circuitry.
What makes this tool random access is the fact that the electron
beam in the cathode ray tube lacks inertia and can be moved anywhere on the
phosphor screen nearly instantaneously.
Once you see how a computer is structured and made, you will
realize that to develop it requires a computer scientist and an electronic
engineer.
While the second one actually solves the hardware problems of
construction of parts and circuits, it is the former who conceptualizes the
ideas.
It is almost like a tango of experimental and mathematical
physicists wherein one conceives the ideas on paper using symbols and the other
laboriously and painstakingly verifies the gestational ideas with innovative
and fancy gadgets.
Generally speaking, it is the theoreticians who tend to get the
glory and the accolades while the engineers and experimentalists go unsung as
far as computers go.
Having designed a memory devise, Williams and Kilburn needed to
test it.
Does it really work?
What do you think they did?
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an IIT graduate and
a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, may I
suggest this large collection of Kids Songs:
The electrostatic charge (or the charge wells) are the result of secondary emission which last for mere 0.2 seconds before dissipating.
A detector plate kept in front of the screen would pick up the charge and thus the data was read and written.
No comments:
Post a Comment