Talk:Computer/Archive 1

message: I heard something about variable computers. If someone knows what they are and how they work, can they type it in?
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Is my thermostat a computer?  :-)
No it is a simple feedback device unless it is a programable thermostat.
Suppose it's programmable.
Then yes, it is a computer.  I think a more natural way of speaking would be to say that it has a computer in it.
Well, no; it has an embedded chip...that doesn't make it a computer, does it?
We have to start with definition. To most people 'computer' means personal computer and even if they think about a supercomputer they see a more powerful pc. If we however stick to the definition 'device that process data' then computer will have much broader meaning. ENIAC was a computer but it did not resemble present computers. A computer computes data therefore any device that does it can be called computer. A programmable thermostat has small computer inside and one of the more sophisticated thermostats might be more powerful than ENIAC.
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I think a strong connotation of computer nowadays is that it is universal (ie. it can perform any computational task).  A thermostat can be incredibly sophisticated but it will still only tell you when to turn on the heater.  A pac-man machine will only play pac-man.  But a computer can do either of those things, or much more, so long as you give it instructions on how to do so.
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A computer used to mean a person that computed, eventually a person 
that computed using an adding machine.  Many of these computers were
women.  The computations were often systems of differential equations 
(or other linear systems), for example,  solving problems in ballistics.
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I intend to give this page a serious working over as the result of some interesting discussions on talk:Konrad Zuse and on the other "history of computing" related pages. Robert Merkel
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As the author of the page (though it has been improved somewhat since) i think a complete rewrite would be nice. I wrote it mostly in desperation that so important a topic had only a one like entry. The current page is better than that but not particularly good.
However, i suggest not deleting anything from the page until you have a complete article that covers all the important stuff already there (and hopefully more!). One way might be to rule a line at the top (or bottom) and start your rewrite in a seperate section. When you have enough there the old version could be removed.
I have seen a few other pages where mediocre articles were deleted by someone who then ran out of steam before completing their rewrite, leaving something worse than the original. Leaving both versions available during the transition protects somewhat against this disaster. Best of luck here!
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I didn't see the above comment until I had committed my rewrite (it was actually a good idea you had, if somebody can restore the old article and hang it somewhere that'd be good).
(Done. It's at the end of the new one. New one is looking good!)
It is approximately half "feature-complete" at this point.  Seeing we already have a great deal of other material on computing topics, I intend to concentrate merely on the "what is a computer" question, with very brief overviews of the other two subheadings.
 
Any suggestions (or just plain edits) on how to improve my explanation of why Turing-completeness is important would be appreciated.  Robert Merkel
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On the commercial computing side, data processing machines began to enter serious use circa 1895 in the USA and during the early 20th century many other places. These machines usually were based on punched cards and could do operations such as sorting, tabulating, counting, and in some cases calculating a total, but were probably not general enough to be considered computers. When computers became cheap enough to be competitive, computers took over because they can do all this, and have much more flexibility. Many of the technologies used in computers 1945-1970 were originally developed for earlier data processing machines and some of the same companies were involved (IBM and Burroughs, maybe Sperry, probably others in other countries). In the history section this seems somehow relevant, but you write so much better than me i leave it to you to decide if, or how, to add it.
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Yes, the new one is really looking good! --LMS
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I think the old version should be moved here. Also, even though the main article could be expanded almost without limit, it might be good to move or remove all the metacomments so that it will read like most of the other articles. David 19:49 Sep 21, 2002 (UTC)
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"It's now commonplace for operating systems to include web browsers, text editors, e-mail programs, network interfaces, movie-players and other programs that were once quite exotic special-order programs." Is this realy true even in windows? In Linux vim or emacs, xine or mplayer, kmail, evolution mutt or pine ,konqueror galeon opera mozilla or firebird would never be considered part of the OS which most people would consider the kernel, likewise for OSX and its BSD derived kernel. Do people realy regard notepad and IE and outlook and windows media player as part of the OS - I know microsoft claims it for IE, but the rest? I'm sure Microsoft would like to claim almost any aplication where they have competition is "part of the OS" so they can happily bundle it with the OS, but bundeling with and being part of are two different things. This passage should be defended or removed, is there any example of an OS where eg the text editor is part of the OS? Generally where the functionality can be provided by an alternative program it cannot be considered part of the OS. The example of network interfaces is the one example of a function which has genuinely been taken over by the os as compared to a third party program (cf. trumpet winsock)
Htaccess
: There's not really a clear line between what is part of the OS and what isn't--usually the core programs are considered a part of it. Programs like QuickTime and Safari could be considered part of Mac OS X because they are first party and are integrated at the system level instead of just the application level. Even a text editor may be--vi is part of the Single Unix Specification. Network interfaces have moved from the userland to the kernel, but the kernel is not the same thing as the OS. --HunterX 22:51, 2005 May 11 (UTC)
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I really like this article but feel it is missing an important piece about the user of computers to decode in WW2. Is that somewhere else and if so can we put in a link to it? --(talk)BozMo 13:37, 14 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, that's what most of the work in building an encyclopedia consists of, isn't it? :-)  As a start, see maybe: Ultra . Kim Bruning 14:09, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

text: Partially done, and extended this comment as a result. Kim Bruning 07:40, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

message: Computar redirects here. Is that right? Neither Dictionary.com nor Google seem to have anything useful. Brianjd
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I removed the information on CPU manufacturers because it was misleading and incomplete. Intel and AMD both make x86 chips and, it doesn't make sense to mention "Motorolla" (68k) and Cyrix (another x86) and not PPC which is still used for a minority of desktops (or for that matter other low-key x86 players like Transmeta or VIA). In any case, information on manufacturers isn't really necessary to a general discussion of ALUs. --HunterX 08:16, 2005 Jan 7 (UTC)
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I think the newly added general principles section is a good idea but I'm not sure Claude Shannon deserves special mention. His work on information theory was very important but this is only incedental to computers. Also he was not the only one thinking about boolean algebra Konrad Zuse was doing the same thing in Germany.  Alan Turing was certainly more important than Shannon but again he is only one of many. In general I think name droping in  a genral principles section is not very helpful since it will evolve into a who's who of computer pioneers.  
-- John Harris 2005, Jan 8
Uh, the reason Shannon is there is NOT because of his work on information theory.  Before you make a fool of yourself further, please read the Shannon article in full, and the attached discussion page, to understand why he is listed in this article.  Shannon had two major accomplishments in life, (1) founding digital circuit or logic design theory, and (2) founding information theory.  It is the first one which was his major fundamental contribution to modern computers.  Otherwise we might still be doing electronic computers the old-fashioned way, totally ad hoc, like Zuse, Stibitz, Atanasoff, etc., instead of doing them the fancy way, with modern Boolean algebra.
--Coolcaesar 05:37, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "[[Computar]]"?? 

message: Somebody needs to fix the image Image:PPTSuperComputersPRINT.jpg -- the vertical axis says that FLOPS = "floating point operations" where FLOPS is actually "floating point operations per second." Gary D Robson 17:33, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error on graph 

message: Where's the history section?  I know, I know...be bold, but is it just somewhere I haven't seen yet? --Wtshymanski 19:47, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: See History of computing hardware.  But also see my comment below - history has been displaced by all the other random crud that this article has accumulated.  --Robert Merkel 04:35, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: History?

message: I have drafted a heavily revised version of this article at Computer/Temp.  I have deliberately narrowed the focus to the modern, digital computer, and removed a lot of the definitional stuff, and tried to give more comprehensive treatment of what a stored-program computer is and what it does.  It still needs a lot of work, but I think it's to a point where it can replace the present article as the basis for future work.  If anybody's got a violent objection to me replacing the present version with the new version, could they say so here? --Robert Merkel 13:31, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  New version drafted at [[Computer/Temp]] 

message: You know, I'm on crack today, it seems. Let me re-state: The halting problem is not NP, as I had stated. It is not solvable, as stated in the edit, which I will restore, but make a bit clearer. -Harmil 15:01, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Halting problem 

message: OK, In the light of some suggestions and mainly positive comments, I have bitten the bullet and replaced the old version with the version from Computer/Temp.  Have at it. --Robert Merkel 05:54, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Replaced with new version

message: One thing the rewrite hasn't really touched is the question of illustration.  While I'm sure we can find suitable photographs, is there anything in this article that really needs a diagram for further elucidation?  Maybe a conceptual diagram of the stored program architecture? --Robert Merkel 04:47, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It would be nice if we had some pictures for the "History" section. --Keramida 05:04, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illustrations... 

message: The recent edit by Jjshapiro is wrong: The quote from Sun was as above, not "the computer is the network".  Also, most of what's been added is better covered in the Internet article.  Also, there's a big difference between networking and internetworking, which was left alone before (not particularly relevant to Computer article anyway) but is nicely muddied here now...   I just don't have time at the moment to try to sort all this out for him/her.  Maybe it should just be reverted, but 210.211.241.195's new para about the WWW wasn't much good either - "shopping or marketing a product"?  Sorry, guys.   --Nigelj 19:18, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Whoops!  Thanks for correcting my reversal of that quote.  But don't you agree that that principle involves a redefinition of the scope of the computer and should be in the Computer article?  I do agree that in principle internetworking doesn't necessarily belong in the Computer article except by extension.  On the other hand, under today's conditions, the internetwork is the network.  Jeremy J. Shapiro 15:18, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "The network is the computer" 

message: I have reverted the history section to an earlier version.  This is an *overview* article, and giving so much prominence to a special-purpose machine like the AtanasoffBerry Computer is inappropriate.  While its contributions of using binary numbers and all-electronic computations were important, it wasn't a general-purpose machine.  It was another step along the path to the general-purpose, stored-program machines, perhaps comparable in importance to the ENIAC and Zuse's various machines and thus worthy of approximately the same amount of space.  Frankly, the ABC page needs some NPOV and cleanup work too (the article confuses the concepts of Turing completeness and the stored program architecture), but that's another issue.  --Robert Merkel 13:49, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I am familiar with the history of the ABC and agree with user Robert Merkel's edit.  Well argued.  --Coolcaesar 05:12, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Atanasoff-Berry Computer 

message: I recently reverted some edits that seemed to confuse computer with personal computer as explained here.  I thought I'd put this here since it could look like vandalism on my part to an outside party.  Indium 10:01, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revert. 

message: I have removed the bit about networking from the lead paragraph; as networking is *not* an essential component of all computers, and it's a hell of a lot older than 10 years.  See embedded computer for an example of computers that often don't have any networking capabilities, and ARPANET for networking that long predates 1995.  Computers are more than just home PC's, people.  --Robert Merkel 12:32, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: revert of first paragraph