Friday, August 29, 2008

Week 2 Readings

I didn't find the Wikipedia articles for either computer hardware or Moore's Law to be particularly helpful. The computer hardware article uses few complete sentences, and the Moore's Law article spends nearly half its length discussing laws other than Moore's. Luckily, I found alternate web pages that discussed these two topics at Hardware (computer) and Forty years of Moore's Law.
I already knew almost everything that the articles on computer hardware had to teach me: i.e., there is input hardware, output hardware, and storage hardware. I did learn a thing or two about the standardization of cables such as serial and USB, though.
Moore's Law I was also pretty familiar with, although it was nice to have a refresher on the details. And it is of course fascinating to speculate as to what will happen when transistors shrink to the "electron leak" stage in about ten years. The video that we were assigned to watch did well to point this problem out and to visualize the impressiveness of constant doubling.
As for computerhistory.org, I have no idea what we're actually supposed to read, having been assigned a website as opposed to a web page. I guess we're just meant to browse the site for a few minutes according to what interests us?

1 comment:

spk said...

My interpretation of the Computer History Museum web-page as a reading assignment was that Dr. He was putting the "content not containers" theory into practice by giving us a bunch of non-linear information to absorb. At first I found this awkward, but quickly I found this "reading" was much more educational than the wikipedia