Vsauce! I’m Jake and welcome to my house! I’m still living that quarantine life so
can’t do the kinds of videos I usually make that require other people with me to create
so I’ve been spending a lot of time on my new computer streaming on Twitch, making videos
on my personal channel - I won an Emmy by the way for my show Could You Survive the
Movies - but you already know that because you’re subscribed to my personal channel
(dead inside noises) and looking at a lot of DONGs...things you can do online now guys. But before we look at DONGS let me show you
my computer…. OriginPC sent me this as my editing/gaming
rig and it turns out that it is NOT the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Because there is no singular machine that
achieves that status. Instead its computers like mine, like yours,
like hundreds of thousands of ones around the planet all working in concert running
folding@home. Folding@home uses distributed computing, that
is individual separate computers all working together to solve problems...specifically
to give scientists access to a significant amount of computing power to simulate protein
dynamics like protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in diseases such as
Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, various cancers, and most recently COVID-19. When your computer is idle, folding@home uses
your CPU and GPU to do those calculations. And it recently became the most powerful supercomputer
reaching 1.5 exaFLOPS, meaning it can perform 1.5 quintillion calculations every second. It has led to 233 research papers being published
with the data that citizen scientists...people like you and I, helped calculate by contributing
our computers. Ya know… Our thinking of what a computer is has changed
over time. For myself, a computer was a relatively large
rectangular box you kept under a desk at home. Or it was something portable like a laptop. Then it became a device a lot of us carry
in our pocket or even on our wrist. But the truth is, we are surrounded by computers
most of the time even though they might not look or function how we think they should. A microwave is a computer, so is an oven,
an electric toothbrush, a standard digital watch, a digital meat thermometer, stoplights,
modern cars, this camera I’m recording on. Heck, even a digital pregnancy test is a computer. Foone on twitter took one apart and found
that the processor inside runs at 4MHz. That’s faster than the Apollo Guidance Computer
that got us to the Moon. They were even able to get Doom playing on
the screen after some more hacking. I’d highly recommend checking out the entire
thread because it is amazing. Back to the topic at hand, the dictionary
classifies a computer as “a programmable electronic device that can store, retrieve,
and process data”. So everything I just rattled off makes sense. And it is interesting, in researching for
this episode I watched a lot of old informational videos about computers and they kept introducing
the machines as “the electronic computer”. But why? Why the adjective electronic before computer? Well if we go to the dictionary, this one
from 1828, a computer was defined as one who computes. Because before the digital age...this was
a computer… All of those photos are from NASA’s human
computers archive which is a wonderful resource to explore but back in the day and by that
I mean up until the 1970s when electronic computers became more affordable, they were
people. It was a job title. A job where you did mathematical equations
and calculations by hand. They were incredibly important in the space
race, war typically calculating artillery trajectories, and for astronomy. I mean, in the 1750’s 3 human computers
were able to calculate and predict the return of Halley’s Comet and were only off by 2
days. Doing this kind of work was immensely time
consuming and there was a massive difference between calculation by hand and calculation
by machine… Electronic computers were created as a tool
to help us solve problems, specifically around mathematics and counting but they weren’t
the first tools humans used. The abacus was the earliest computing device
we know of. It dates back to about 3,000 years ago. And if you’ve never played with one before
here is a quick rundown: From right to left, you have ones, 10s, 100s,
and so on. The top beads represent a value of 5 and the
bottom beads represent a value of 1. Ultimately, you could assign whatever value
you wanted. If we wanted to find out what 1267 + 5198
was we first input 1267 and then start adding 5198 from the left. 1+5 is 6, 2+1 is 3, 9+6 is 15 and we carry
the one over to the hundreds position, 7+8 is also 15 and we carry the one to the 10s
position and we get 6465 we did basic addition. Hurray for us! The abacus was also used for subtraction,
multiplication, division and basic accounting needs. And yes, it might seem a bit simplistic to
us as a calculator now but you can imagine how valuable a tool like this was. But as with everything, our ambition and understanding
of math became greater which led to more problems and we needed more sophisticated tools to
solve them. Napier’s Bones were invented in 1617 by
mathematician John Napier, the same dude who discovered logarithms. What made Napier’s Bones such a huge leap
forward over the abacus was while it could do all the same kinds of calculations as an
abacus, it could also do square and cube roots. So let’s take a look at this simulator and
do a quick multiplication problem. Choose a 4 digit number. Ok, 6735, nice choice, and let’s multiply
it by 6. We go down to 6 and this makes it so easy. The first number we see next to the 6 is the
first digit of our answer 3, then we add 6 + 4, carry the 1 to our 3, add 2 +1, then
8+3 and carry the 1 and this number is your final digit and boom, our answer is 40,410. A few years after the invention of Napier’s
Bones came the slide rule or the slipstick. You’ve probably seen one before and people
still use them because they are rad. They can do multiplication, division, exponents,
roots, logarithms, trigonometry and one of my favorite features...conversions. If we flip the slide rule over you’re given
a lot of options. Let’s see what 5 miles is in kilometers...just
over 8. Handy. If you want to become a master of the slide
rule there is this necessary and very in depth guide to help. Ok, so we’ve had computing devices, albeit
non-electronic ones, for a very long while but the issue that kept coming up was time. While devices we just played around with made
solving problems faster, it still wasn't fast enough as problems became larger and significantly
more complicated. As the video clip said earlier, the first
electronic calculator could do the work of 50,000 people working by hand. Which is what spurred the computer revolution One thing I’d really like to point out from
those clips, is just how massive a computer used to be… Not only were computers huge, like take up
an entire room big, but early computers could only run one program at a time. And for the most part, you couldn’t store
said program on the computer. It had to be ingested into the machine physically
everytime you wanted to run it using the most common form at the time. Punched Cards. Using the Virtual Card Read Punch we can see
what that process was like. Before even getting to the punch stage though
you would write your code out in longhand, then punch it in on cards. Each card represents one line of code, the
more involved your program was the more cards you’d need. Once finished with that, take it over to Read
so your program can be ingested into the system. If that is successful, it can be executed. And look at that, we have a game of tic-tac-toe. Some programs would be so large that the punched
cards necessary to run it would fill an entire box. And to get the program out, a person would
physically have to get the box and unpack it. Just like how a modern computer will unpack
an application or a folder. But a huge limitation to the tool that is
the electronic computer was, like I said a moment ago, that it could only run one program
at a time, could only solve one problem at a time. So something had to be changed. The
operating system! We interact with them, or view them, in a
much different way than their initial purpose. Because an operating system, as the name suggests,
allows the system to do multiple operations at once. And this was huge! No longer would one programmer have to wait
for another programmers program to finish. They could be running at the same time! And, in case you’re not a fossil like me,
let’s check out some old operating systems. PCjs has a myriad of OSs you can emulate. Let’s check out the very first public release
of Microsoft Windows. Woah. But it does have a calculator and paint! Let’s skip ahead and check out Windows 95
which was notable because it introduced the start menu, notifications, taskbar and the
desktop which is commonplace on pretty much every current operating system. I would highly recommend exploring this site
a bit. Not only are there a bunch of OSs to check
out but you can also find old games like Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen. Computers have only become more intuitive,
faster, smaller and more affordable over time...and not even that long of a time. I mean, your cell phone is tens of thousands
of times faster than the first home computers. My watch is faster than the first computer
I built when I was 14. This beast of a machine has a CPU with 32
cores and a Titan RTX. And all of this reminds me of a quote from
one of those old educational computer videos I’ve been watching… And that’s exactly where we are today. We are using our computers in ways that the
initial programmers and users could have only dreamed of. We can connect to one another in new ways,
we can solve problems in new ways and solve new problems. I want to go back to the beginning with the
very first DONG, Folding@home because to me that is one of the best examples of the power
of computers. It’s accessibility. Future solutions, future discoveries wont
be done by just one individual, by one person. It will be done by a collective of people
all working together using the tools they have to solve mysteries and problems that
could have never been solved before. I started using Folding@Home back on my PlayStation
3. And we all have the opportunity now to be
citizen scientists. To use our tools to help others. I love that. Links to everything can be found in the description
below. I’m going to leave you with one last clip
from the video “Logic by Machine”.Stay safe and, as always, thanks for watching.
