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Primitive QuestionsI am completely at lost. You talked about digital signals. How do you leap to designing computational devices?There are switches, which form the logic gates, which form the memory, and arithmetic logic units which along with certain other devices can be made to do computations. How do switches lead to logic devices? Switches which now days imply transistors represent on and off condition. The instructions and programs are represented in computers as on or off. Why on or off, why not use some other means? Certainly, other means were employed in early (upto early 1930's) computation devices such as cash registers, and adding machines. Early computation devices were mechanical devices. They used gears, shafts, and other mechanical devices to do computations. This was the case up to the point when Defrost invented the vacuum tube which eventually lead to the electronic revolution of the l940's onward. The logical organization of a computer need not be and often is not depended on the physical implementation. The physical implementation can be mechanical, electrical, biological, or some combination. In fact, today's computer is mainly based on the logical conceptions of Charles Babbage who attempted on building a computer during 1840's, a century before the present model came into existence. More on this stuff later. You still have not explained why on and off? In building the EDVAC computer, the binary representation of numbers was used to reduce the number of vacuum tubes [comp93]. Binary representation was first pioneered by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), and Boolean algebra was developed by which used…. The reason for choosing binary representation in computers is that it can be represented simply by on or off of a switch. On representing 5 volts, and off representing 0 volts. When you say binary representation, what exactly do you mean? |