Vsauce!
I’m Jake and welcome to my house!
I’m still living that quarantine life so can’t do the kinds of videos I usually make
that require other people with me to create so I’ve been spending a lot of time on my
new computer streaming on Twitch, making videos on my personal channel - I won an Emmy by
the way for my show Could You Survive the Movies - but you already know that because
you’re subscribed to my personal channel (dead inside noises) and looking at a lot
of DONGs...things you can do online now guys.
But before we look at DONGS let me show you my computer….
OriginPC sent me this as my editing/gaming rig and it turns out that it is NOT the most
powerful supercomputer in the world.
Because there is no singular machine that achieves that status.
Instead its computers like mine, like yours, like hundreds of thousands of ones around
the planet all working in concert running folding@home.
Folding@home uses distributed computing, that is individual separate computers all working
together to solve problems...specifically to give scientists access to a significant
amount of computing power to simulate protein dynamics like protein folding and the movements
of proteins implicated in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, various cancers,
and most recently COVID-19.
When your computer is idle, folding@home uses your CPU and GPU to do those calculations.
And it recently became the most powerful supercomputer reaching 1.5 exaFLOPS, meaning it can perform
1.5 quintillion calculations every second.
It has led to 233 research papers being published with the data that citizen scientists...people
like you and I, helped calculate by contributing our computers.
Ya know…
Our thinking of what a computer is has changed over time.
For myself, a computer was a relatively large rectangular box you kept under a desk at home.
Or it was something portable like a laptop.
Then it became a device a lot of us carry in our pocket or even on our wrist.
But the truth is, we are surrounded by computers most of the time even though they might not
look or function how we think they should.
A microwave is a computer, so is an oven, an electric toothbrush, a standard digital
watch, a digital meat thermometer, stoplights, modern cars, this camera I’m recording on.
Heck, even a digital pregnancy test is a computer.
Foone on twitter took one apart and found that the processor inside runs at 4MHz.
That’s faster than the Apollo Guidance Computer that got us to the Moon.
They were even able to get Doom playing on the screen after some more hacking.
I’d highly recommend checking out the entire thread because it is amazing.
Back to the topic at hand, the dictionary classifies a computer as “a programmable
electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data”.
So everything I just rattled off makes sense.
And it is interesting, in researching for this episode I watched a lot of old informational
videos about computers and they kept introducing the machines as “the electronic computer”.
But why?
Why the adjective electronic before computer?
Well if we go to the dictionary, this one from 1828, a computer was defined as one who
computes.
Because before the digital age...this was a computer…
All of those photos are from NASA’s human computers archive which is a wonderful resource
to explore but back in the day and by that I mean up until the 1970s when electronic
computers became more affordable, they were people.
It was a job title.
A job where you did mathematical equations and calculations by hand.
They were incredibly important in the space race, war typically calculating artillery
trajectories, and for astronomy.
I mean, in the 1750’s 3 human computers were able to calculate and predict the return
of Halley’s Comet and were only off by 2 days.
Doing this kind of work was immensely time consuming and there was a massive difference
between calculation by hand and calculation by machine…
Electronic computers were created as a tool to help us solve problems, specifically around
mathematics and counting but they weren’t the first tools humans used.
The abacus was the earliest computing device we know of.
It dates back to about 3,000 years ago.
And if you’ve never played with one before here is a quick rundown:
From right to left, you have ones, 10s, 100s, and so on.
The top beads represent a value of 5 and the bottom beads represent a value of 1.
Ultimately, you could assign whatever value you wanted.
If we wanted to find out what 1267 + 5198 was we first input 1267 and then start adding
5198 from the left.
1+5 is 6, 2+1 is 3, 9+6 is 15 and we carry the one over to the hundreds position, 7+8
is also 15 and we carry the one to the 10s position and we get 6465 we did basic addition.
Hurray for us!
The abacus was also used for subtraction, multiplication, division and basic accounting
needs.
And yes, it might seem a bit simplistic to us as a calculator now but you can imagine
how valuable a tool like this was.
But as with everything, our ambition and understanding of math became greater which led to more problems
and we needed more sophisticated tools to solve them.
Napier’s Bones were invented in 1617 by mathematician John Napier, the same dude who
discovered logarithms.
What made Napier’s Bones such a huge leap forward over the abacus was while it could
do all the same kinds of calculations as an abacus, it could also do square and cube roots.
So let’s take a look at this simulator and do a quick multiplication problem.
Choose a 4 digit number.
Ok, 6735, nice choice, and let’s multiply it by 6.
We go down to 6 and this makes it so easy.
The first number we see next to the 6 is the first digit of our answer 3, then we add 6
+ 4, carry the 1 to our 3, add 2 +1, then 8+3 and carry the 1 and this number is your
final digit and boom, our answer is 40,410.
A few years after the invention of Napier’s Bones came the slide rule or the slipstick.
You’ve probably seen one before and people still use them because they are rad.
They can do multiplication, division, exponents, roots, logarithms, trigonometry and one of
my favorite features...conversions.
If we flip the slide rule over you’re given a lot of options.
Let’s see what 5 miles is in kilometers...just over 8.
Handy.
If you want to become a master of the slide rule there is this necessary and very in depth
guide to help.
Ok, so we’ve had computing devices, albeit non-electronic ones, for a very long while
but the issue that kept coming up was time.
While devices we just played around with made solving problems faster, it still wasn't fast
enough as problems became larger and significantly more complicated.
As the video clip said earlier, the first electronic calculator could do the work of
50,000 people working by hand.
Which is what spurred the computer revolution
One thing I’d really like to point out from those clips, is just how massive a computer
used to be…
Not only were computers huge, like take up an entire room big, but early computers could
only run one program at a time.
And for the most part, you couldn’t store said program on the computer.
It had to be ingested into the machine physically everytime you wanted to run it using the most
common form at the time.
Punched Cards.
Using the Virtual Card Read Punch we can see what that process was like.
Before even getting to the punch stage though you would write your code out in longhand,
then punch it in on cards.
Each card represents one line of code, the more involved your program was the more cards
you’d need.
Once finished with that, take it over to Read so your program can be ingested into the system.
If that is successful, it can be executed.
And look at that, we have a game of tic-tac-toe.
Some programs would be so large that the punched cards necessary to run it would fill an entire
box.
And to get the program out, a person would physically have to get the box and unpack
it.
Just like how a modern computer will unpack an application or a folder.
But a huge limitation to the tool that is the electronic computer was, like I said a
moment ago, that it could only run one program at a time, could only solve one problem at
a time.
So something had to be changed.
The operating system!
We interact with them, or view them, in a much different way than their initial purpose.
Because an operating system, as the name suggests, allows the system to do multiple operations
at once.
And this was huge!
No longer would one programmer have to wait for another programmers program to finish.
They could be running at the same time!
And, in case you’re not a fossil like me, let’s check out some old operating systems.
PCjs has a myriad of OSs you can emulate.
Let’s check out the very first public release of Microsoft Windows.
Woah.
But it does have a calculator and paint!
Let’s skip ahead and check out Windows 95 which was notable because it introduced the
start menu, notifications, taskbar and the desktop which is commonplace on pretty much
every current operating system.
I would highly recommend exploring this site a bit.
Not only are there a bunch of OSs to check out but you can also find old games like Wolfenstein
3D and Commander Keen.
Computers have only become more intuitive, faster, smaller and more affordable over time...and
not even that long of a time.
I mean, your cell phone is tens of thousands of times faster than the first home computers.
My watch is faster than the first computer I built when I was 14.
This beast of a machine has a CPU with 32 cores and a Titan RTX.
And all of this reminds me of a quote from one of those old educational computer videos
I’ve been watching…
And that’s exactly where we are today.
We are using our computers in ways that the initial programmers and users could have only
dreamed of.
We can connect to one another in new ways, we can solve problems in new ways and solve
new problems.
I want to go back to the beginning with the very first DONG, Folding@home because to me
that is one of the best examples of the power of computers.
It’s accessibility.
Future solutions, future discoveries wont be done by just one individual, by one person.
It will be done by a collective of people all working together using the tools they
have to solve mysteries and problems that could have never been solved before.
I started using Folding@Home back on my PlayStation 3.
And we all have the opportunity now to be citizen scientists.
To use our tools to help others.
I love that.
Links to everything can be found in the description below.
I’m going to leave you with one last clip from the video “Logic by Machine”.Stay
safe and, as always, thanks for watching.