CHAPTER 1 A WORLD OF TECHNOLOGY In today's world computers are all around us Things you enjoy every day such as video games TV and the Internet are all possible because of computers Computers are made of two separate parts that work together One piece is the hardware and the other piece is the software Hardware describes the actual physical electronic machine The software is the instructions for the machine to follow They tell the hardware what to do
My products Deposits Transfers Cards Credit Accounts Bank FACT A computer program is another name for software Think about video games The video game hardware draws pixels on your TV It detects what buttons you pressed on your controller The video game software controls everything else In a basketball video game it's the computer program that makes the pixels look like a basketball player and turns a button push into a slam dunk High definition TV screens hold a grid of 1 920 by 1 080 pixels That's more than 2 million colored dots Computers are powerful because they can follow extremely simple step by step instructions very quickly They can also store enormous amounts of information Computer programmers figure out those steps and how to use that information With the help of computer programmers computer hardware can become something exciting to use and see Computer programmers have created video games web browsers social media online banking websites and self driving cars The possibilities are limited only by your imagination pixel one of the tiny dots on a TV screen or computer monitor that make up the visual image browser a software program that lets a user find information images and video on the Internet
Computers have become more advanced in the last 50 years Programs can now turn human speech into text synthesize the human voice and recognize who is in a photograph Computers can even use three dimensional 3 D printers to create objects from models designed on computers You might think computer programming is too difficult for you to understand But all you need to know is how to read do math follow instructions and think logically Give it a shot As a computer programmer you could help create the technology of the future 3 D printers print out objects one layer at a time synthesize to create something in an unnatural way such as converting typed text into spoken words
CHAPTER 2 COMPUTERS THROUGHOUT HISTORY It may seem hard to believe but less than 100 years ago computers as we know them today did not exist Yet for hundreds of years humans have built clever machines to help with tasks The abacus was invented more than 2 000 years ago to help with mathematics The sextant was a tool sailors used to navigate the ocean People even built machines that used gears and levers to do math equations But none of these inventions were nearly as advanced as modern day computers In the mid 1800s Charles Babbage and Ava Lovelace produced some of the earliest work that resembles today's computers and computer programs They designed a general purpose programmable machine Because it was so complex for its time they couldn't figure out how to build their machine But the ideas they had were so good that programmers still use them today
