Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin so what exactly is a computer now obviously it's the tower that sits on your desk or the laptop that goes into your bag what about the phone in your pocket or even to watch on your wrist has it all even work head back to the 1940s and one of the first computers was the ENIAC which was based on vacuum tubes with over 17,000 of them weighing 30 tons altogether and taking up as much space as a large house completed the tail end of World War 2 the ENIAC was designed to test the feasibility of things like the hydrogen bomb however at its core it was simply something that could do a lot of math very fast today the brains of a computer is called a processor or CPU for short essentially what it does is the same thing as the ENIAC although on a much faster scale instead of doing thousands of calculations a second it's in the billions while the hardware used to actually create a processor has definitely changed the general ideas behind it really haven't so if you should a modern CPU - a design or 50 years ago they're pretty much be able to figure everything out although it definitely would be on a much much much smaller scale because modern processors are so powerful allows us to do things like create an online video service such as YouTube so actually speaking of let's take a look at this video so right now you're watching a 1080p video playback at 30 frames per second so essentially that is is 2 million pixels that are being changed 30 times every single second to create the illusion of actual motion now in reality it's just a series of still images that are played back very quickly kind of trick your brain however with the modern computer you can play lots of images play them very fast and you really won't be able to tell the difference however if you're using a computer say from 20 years ago the output might look a little something like this so there's absolutely no smooth motion it looks very jittery it looks very weird however because there's so much power so many transistors so many calculations every single second it makes fluid cool-looking motion like this over the Internet totally possible so far I've spent a lot of time talking about more standard kinds of computers however the term computer actually applies to a lot of things including not only your phone but basically anything that can actually execute a program which includes a lot of things when you start looking at it let's say I want to play a game of flappy bird on my Moto X as I play the system on a chip is lighting up a pair of CPU cores for GPU cores and 16 billion ones and zeroes that make up the memory for storing the application this is an enormous ly complicated series of parts that all have to work together perfectly to do something as seemingly simple as play a game however the entire system on a chip will actually fit on this dime this is definitely a computer however I can see making an argument that so is this I mean yeah it might be a printer however it does have a processor it has an operating system screen it even connects via Wi-Fi even a mouse and keyboard has some logic as well as some wireless capabilities something as seemingly simple as a hard drive has a full-blown processor that is more powerful than what some of the moon missions had and even some webcams can actually have some pretty decent horsepower inside that you would never really expect now take a minute and look around the room that you're in right now how many computers are around you at this very second odds are probably more than you think computers like this are absolutely everywhere around us today and they're only going to get more and more common as things get cheaper and smaller a term you're going to be hearing a lot about soon is the Internet of Things things like the nest thermostat and hue light bulbs that are smart enough to connect to the internet and report back to your phone are the first step but before long devices like these as well as wearables are going to be just as much a part of our lives today as phones are coming back full circle to the ENIAC what 70 years ago required a computer the size of a house over a day to complete can now be done in a single second on a device that fits in your pocket just imagine where we'll be in another 10 years much less 70 anyway thank you guys for watching and I will catch you in the next one