

How It Works...The Computer (1971) - brazzy
http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/

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shin_lao
Hi, I am a traveler from the future!

My telephone is more powerful than all the computers of your world put
together.

I use this power to run a program that simulates a lighter on the screen of my
phone.

~~~
mojuba
Hi, I'm from superfuture and I can simulate the world of your time in my
phone, except I'm still paying 40c per minute for phone calls.

~~~
angstrom
And 10c per text message...while the actual cost to the operators has
approached zero.

~~~
tl
Actually in the superfuture the cost is negative; advertising based on the
context of recent text messages causes the operator to make a small amount of
money (about $.005) per message sent.

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petercooper
I had this book as a 5-6 year old in the mid 80s. It's easy, now, to
underestimate the importance of short, high level books like these on the
imagination of children.

Is there anything similar today? (That, ideally, is not 99% software or
content creation focused, as most introductory computing books I've seen
recently are.)

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matclayton
Found a copy of this at my Grans house, about a month ago. She had just picked
it up at a church book club to learn more about how her (Windows 3.0) computer
works :) If only we can get her to upgrade..... alas. She found it very
understandable and definitely a good intro to old school computing.

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kulkarnic
I actually inherited this book from my grandfather. It's actually quite a nice
book, and for the times, seems like a introduction.

I remember being pretty impressed by punch-cards for some time after I read
the book--my attempts to find one at school were met with some quizzical looks
though.

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aleem
The first mechanical calculator was actually designed by Da Vinci not Pascal.
<http://aleembawany.com/articles/history-of-computers/>

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arethuza
I'm pretty sure I can remember this from the early '70 (I was born in '65) -
for some reason the bit about Analog and Digital computers stuck in my
brain....

~~~
jacquesm
There is an interesting parallel between the 'bleeding edge' of digital
computing and analog computing in the form of propagation networks.

Analog computing never really went away, each and every opamp is essentially
an minimal analog computer.

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AndrejM
Hehe, I have a 1984 book about computers, with a ZX Spectrum on the front
cover. Got it from my dad. It's not in English, though.

