Readings for week 2

-Computer hardware (Article from Wikipedia): This Wikipedia page gives an overview of what computer hardware is, and what it contains. It also gives a brief definition for acronyms such as RAM (Random access memory) and CPU (central processing unit). This page was useful to me, because before this I didn’t know much about what went into a computer to make it work. Before reading this I thought I knew what hardware was, but I really didn’t know everything that can be considered part of hardware. For instance, I would not have thought that the fans and case (tower) were hardware; I thought hardware was mainly the RAM and CPU (though I wasn’t sure what those were either).
-Moore’s Law (Article from Wikipedia and video): This law states that in computers, the transistors that make up the circuits can be made smaller in a way that they can be doubled approximately every 2 years. In other words, computers become more and more powerful, yet smaller for about the same cost, and the rate that they do this doubles every two years. It is said that this is exponentially increasing. The video stated that this will stop increasing in about 10 years, because the transistors would have become so small that they no longer work, yet the Wikipedia article stated that Moore’s law would remain true until processors are so small they are on a molecular scale. (Are these the same two end points or different?) While hardware gets faster and smaller every two years, software is not increasing at the same levels, so computers do not seem to be as fast as they are.
-Computer History Museum (website): One thing I found interesting about the computer history museum site was the pictured of processing chips they had under the section called “The Silicone Engine.” These were interesting because they were a picture of Moore’s Law. They showed how many more transistors microchips have each decade, from 1 transistor in the 1950’s up to 592,000,000 in the 2000’s.