Computer

The name "computer", adopted in the Russian-language scientific literature, is synonymous with a computer. Currently, it has almost been ousted from everyday use and is mainly used by digital electronics engineers as a legal term in legal documents, as well as in the historical sense - to refer to computer equipment of the 1940s and 1980s and large computing devices, as opposed to personal ones.

So who invented the first computer? It is customary to call the ancestor Charles Babbage, who was fond of computational sciences from a young age. Based on many years of work, he invented a mechanism capable of performing additions using the difference method. His design consisted of many bulky gears.

Of course, computers did not appear immediately. Man created a computer to facilitate the work with information. At first, these were simple calculations with numbers, such as the nodular method of counting (VIII - VII century BC) or later accounts (XV - XVI centuries AD). Then the methods became more complicated and people began to build entire computers: 1642 Belz Pascal, 1822-1838 Charles Babbage and others.

So, the first computer created in the history of mankind is Blaise Pascal's counting machine, which arose in 1642. It was the first primitive calculator that helped the inventor add and subtract. The invention of Pascal is considered the zero stage in the development of computers and for its time it was a progressive device, because there had been no previous attempts to mechanize calculations.

The "computer" invented by Pascal was called "Pascalina" and it was a box with numerous gears. Using the wheels, the device allowed you to enter numbers from 0 to 9, and in the upper part of the case, after entering the initial data, the result was shown.

The advent of transistors and the second generation of computers

In the 60s there was another round in development - the history of the computer moved to the second generation of computers. This was the invention of the transistor - the first semiconductor that replaced the vacuum tube.

The dimensions of such a computer have decreased significantly.

Increased productivity - from hundreds of thousands to 1 million operations per second.

The computer memory was several tens of thousands of words, the RAM reached up to 32 KB.

Thanks to the transistor computer, the development of high-level programming languages ​​begins.

The invention of the transistor contributed to a real surge in the development of the computer. In various countries - the USA, the USSR, England, France, Japan - they are developing their own, more and more advanced computers. There are external memory devices, I / O devices, multiprocessing and less significant structural changes to the computer.

Quantum computers

Quantum computers don't look like normal computers. These are large metal cylinders with twisted wires that are lowered into refrigeration units. They can be used for a variety of tasks, including calculations in chemistry and physics, or to create new materials. Another area of application of a quantum computer is cryptography and security issues.

Quantum computers and quantum computing are a new buzzword that has been added to our information space along with artificial intelligence, machine learning and other high-tech terms. At the same time, I have not been able to find material on the Internet that would put a puzzle in my head called “how quantum computers work”. Yes, there are many excellent works, including on Habra (see the list of resources), comments on which, as is usually the case, are even more informative and useful, but the picture in my head, as they say, did not add up.

The basis for calculations of this type is a qubit - a system in which the number of particles is similar to the momentum, and the phase variable (energy state) is the coordinate. The phase qubit was first implemented in the laboratory of Delft University and has been actively studied since then. Qubits can, as it were, be in two states simultaneously: contain zero and one at once. Thanks to this, a quantum computer can perform specific mathematical tasks thousands of times faster than classical computers.

in the future, computers will take an even bigger place and will be accepted in completely different spheres of life