第一节 计算机早期历史

Hello World!

Hello World! welcome to Mr.Guo's Computer Science Class.

Over the course of this series, we're going to go from Bits(位), Bytes(字节), Transistors(晶体管）and Logic Gates(逻辑门), all the way to Operatoring Systems, Virtual Reality and Robots!

We are going to cover a lot, but just to clear thing up, we Are Not going to teach you how to program. 

Instead, we're going to explore  a range of computing topics as a discipline(学科） and technology.

Computers are the lifeblood of today's world. 计算机是当今世界的命脉

If they were to suddenly turn off, all at once, the power grid （电网）would shut down, cars would crash, planes would fall, water treatment plants would stop, stock markets would freeze(证券市场会停止运作），trucks with food wouldn't know where to deliver, and employees wouldn't get paid.

Even many non-computer objects -like T-shirts or school uniform and the chairs you are sitting on are made in factories run by computers.

Computing really has transformed nearly every aspect of our lives.

计算机改变了我们生活中几乎所有方面

And this isn't the first time we've seen this sort of technology-driven global change.

Advances in manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution brought a new scale( 规模 ） to human civilization - in agriculture， industry, domestic life ( 畜牧业 ）

Mechanization meat superior harvests and more food, mass produced goods, cheaper and faster travel and communication, and usually a better quality of life.

And computing technolog is doing the same right now, -from automated farming and medical equipment, to global telecommunications and educational opportunities, and new frontiers like Virtual Reality and Self Driving Cars.

We are living in a time likely to be remembered as the Electronic Age.

现在的这个时代很有可能被后人称为“信息时代”

And with  billions of transistors in just your smartphones, computers can seem pretty complicated, but really (但是，实际上）， they're just simple machines that perform complex actions through many layers of abstraction.

So in this series, we're going break down those layers, and build up from simple 1's and 0's, to logic units, CPUS, operating systems, the entire internet and beyond. 

And don't worry, in the same way someone buying t-shirts on a webpage doesn't need to know how that webpage was programmed, or the web designer doesn't need to know how all the packets are routed, or router(路由器） engineers don't need to know about transistor logic.

this series will build on previous episodes but not be dependent on them.

【有些章节的依赖性还是比较强的，本集依赖于前一集的基础，有的章节是很散的，可以并发进行】

By the end of this series, I hope that you can better contextualize computing's role both in your own life and society, and how humanity's greatest invention is just in its infancy,with its biggest impacts yet to come.

But before we get into all that, we should start at computing's origins,

because although electronic computers are relatively new, (虽然电子计算机才出现不久），the need for computation is not 

The early history of Computing

The earliest recognized device for computing was the abacus, invented in Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE.It's essentially a hand operated calculator, that helps add and subtract many numbers. It also stores the current state of the computation, much like your hard drive does today.

它存储着当前的计算状态，类似于如今的硬盘。

The abacus was created because, the scale of society had become greater than what a single person could keep and manipulate in their mind.

There might be thousands of people in a village or tens of thousands of cattle.

There are many variants of the abacus, but let's look at a really basic version with each row representing a differenct power of ten.