Day 5, or: Class was AWESOME. AGAIN.

COMPUTERS

Why am I never bored learning about computers and the internet? This class felt as interesting and exciting as the first lecture, when we talked about the history of the internet. Instead of the internet, it was about computers, but learning about the "intimate"(so to speak) details of the computer and how it came to be was very much fun for me. I had always just accepted the fact that the computer had a "ROM" and a "RAM", but knowing what it means is definitely a lot cooler. Compared to the rest of the lecture though, I didn't find the case discussion about wireless employee connectivity as thrilling. The "crackberry" concept was funny, but paled in comparison to later discussions about mainframes and servers.

Somewhere along the way my inner Asian math, science, and technology geek must have been suppressed. With how much I enjoyed math and science(for getting terrible grades at it) in high school, I have no idea whatsoever how I ended up in a business school. Oh well. Moving on.

From the history of computers section, the power of the abacus really stood out to me. Even being Chinese, and associated with the origin of the abacus, I had simply used to accept it as some crazy counting tool that only the truly insane math heads could work. I was definitely more inclined to shake the beads and play with it than try to figure out how abacus(es?) could do calculus. But apparently they...can? And are as powerful as modern calculators, in a relationship that I currently still don't understand. I must look up and think about why is it that being able to do the four basic functions, a tool or machine can than do all of the rest of math's calculations. This lecture simply imparted in me that it can, not why it can.

The most interesting part of the lecture for me was the discussion of the CPU. As previously mentioned, I'd usually glance and gloss over computer specs that came with new pcs, kind of noting them in my head but generally not understanding what each part meant. Like a previous class' example of transforming a string of numbers into an airplane's leaving and arrival time and locations, this discussion did that for me and my understanding of computer specs, at least in part. Particularly, I didn't know that RAM was so powerful, and considered an expensive portion of the computer. I knew ROM stood for Read Only Memory, but never heard exactly what memory it's storing.

After the descriptions of the microcomputers, I started falling behind the lecturing speed(or it started speeding up...), and so did not fully comprehend the portion, but wrote down most of it. I seem to write faster than my brain works, in these fast paced situations. The portion about terminals, especially, was all a blur, but the pictures of the rack server and blade server did help with the last bit about storage systems. A picture is worth a thousand words?

Kinda curious, instead of scared, of what the test will bring. Although sometimes I think I'm too stress free for my own good. Mosquitos are apparently attracted to bodies that produce less stress hormones...