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The Apollo Program Had Some Of The First Integrated Circuits In Use I think that we have all noticed the incredible progress that is being made with computers in all forms. I say all forms, because computers are in almost everything today. Who would've ever thought in the 1960s that computers would be running our cars and our telephones? As far as phones are concerned, our cell phones are really computers that contain an application that allow us to make a call, but they are capable of doing more than any computer was 40 years ago, no matter what size it was. Think of it this way, if you were to take your cell phone back in time and go to the year 1960, your cell phone would've probably been considered a supercomputer. Supercomputers in the 1960s were marked by the fact that computers had just changed over to transistors. Integrated circuits, which most of us call microchips today, started being inserted into commercial computers in 1965, the first integrated circuit had actually appeared in 1958. One of the early users of this was NASA, who had it installed in their Apollo guidance computer and the Department of Defense which used it in the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. It has only been a couple of years since the computer world has gone from a single central processing unit for home use to multiple core central processing units. The strides we have made in computing are incredible. If it wasn't for the fact that companies need to sell a certain amount of chips to make them profitable, there wouldn't be even this much of a delay from one chip to the next more advanced chip. I can't help but remember when someone that I worked with bought a computer that had a central processing unit that ran at the speed of 1 GB. I remember how we all thought this was incredible. Today a 1 GB single core chip in a computer would not only be considered obsolete, but practically unusable under certain circumstances. It wasn't that long ago when laptops were having a hard time displaying video, but today almost every device can display at least 720P high definition video. We have come a long way in a short time, but what lies ahead for us is going to be even more amazing. If we are fortunate enough not to be wiped out by some asteroid, or some nuclear explosion as prophesied on the History Channel, we will not only see our devices performing amazing things, but the devices themselves may be completely different in how they work. Right now we are on the verge of being able to make all our devices broadcast images in three dimensions without glasses. It is already being done on a portable game machine. There are several different ways to do this and after it is perfected, the next step just might be a hologram. That will be where an image is projected by your device in front of you and it will seem like it is really there. A hologram is created when two or more beams of light overlap each other. The images are created by a pattern that is formed. The unique part about this is that if you can walk around the image and see it from every angle. If you had a holographic image of a person in front of you, you could walk behind it and see the back of the person. While you may not want to do this while you were watching entertainment, the image of the scene certainly would look a lot more real as the characters change positions and some walk off and some walk on.
Cell Phone While smaller devices such as cell phones are using single core chips, all this is scheduled to change. At least one company and probably more are coming out with dual core chips for cell phones, which should increase their power tremendously. The reason that cell phones fell behind computers on computing power was the fact that the more power they had, the shorter the battery life. Nobody wants to have a cell phone with a battery that runs out only after a few minutes. It is amazing, but the new Snapdragon chip that is due out next year, is a dual core chip that is five times more powerful than the one that is used in many cell phones today and yet it is said to be able to give quite a good battery life. Not only are there now going to be two cores instead of one, but each core is faster than the present individual chip that is being used. When these new chips arrive your telephone should be as powerful as many of the netbook computers. A lot of progress has been made in robotics and after all what is a robot? It is a computer. Webster defines a robot as, “a machine that looks like a human being and performs various complex acts (as walking or talking) of a human being; also : a similar but fictional machine whose lack of capacity for human emotions is often emphasized ”. In some cases however a robot can be a machine that bears no resemblance to human whatsoever. One example of this is a drone which is a robotic plane. Another example is the new tracked vehicles that the Army uses to send into buildings. They are armed and controlled by soldiers who can see what is happening through the TV camera on the machine and operate a weapon contained in the device. These new robots have become the favorites of people that have to dispose of bombs, because they could send the machine in instead of human. How are computers going to advance in the future? Are we going to get more and more cores on one chip and maybe reach something like 1024 cores? It is beginning to look like the days of the digital computer are numbered. Since our computers can only operate using zeros and ones they will always be limited in some way. Right now science is trying to perfect a quantum computer. It is a very complicated device and has been worked on for many years, but the advantage of this computer would be that it could operate in three or more states depending on any many *qubits are being used, not two states like our present computers. The two states being on or off expressed as 0 and 1. The main advantage to having a quantum computer is not that it will be able to do things that a regular computer can't do because of certain physical laws, its main advantage is in speed. It might be thousands of times faster than our current technology.
Prism Breaking Light Into Different Wavelengths Before we get into quantum computing however, the next step may be that our computers will be powered by light. This is called photonics technology. Crystals are being developed that will be able to not only send one beam of light through a computer but many different wavelengths, which would make it possible to send huge amounts of data at the same time. The faster computers are made to go, the more heat that is generated on different parts including the central processing unit and that is one of the reasons why they are made smaller and smaller, this is to allow them to operate on less voltage. This process of shrinking central processing units will come to an end some day, when they can no longer be made any smaller. It is said that the photonic computer will solve this problem, because the beams of light will not generate anywhere near as much heat. At the same time all this data flowing simultaneously will increase the speed of the computer considerably. So there you have it, something new is on its way and is going to make everything that we are using today completely obsolete. Will quantum computers be perfected before the photonic computer? Probably not, but there is always a chance, if some breakthrough is discovered.
*Qubit - “or quantum bit is a unit of quantum information —the quantum analogue of the classical bit—with additional dimensions associated to the quantum properties of a physical atom“
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