Thursday, February 22, 2007

I Love Computers...

Being a Computer Science student, you would expect me to say something on these lines, wouldn't you? But I think this statement goes beyond that...

When I opted for Computer Science at BITS, I did so primarily because I had little idea about the remaining branches of engineering. I seemed to be quite interested in electronics, but I had no idea as to whether I wanted Electrical and Electronics engineering or whether I should opt for Electronics and Instrumentation engineering. So rather than opt for a discipline which I had no idea about, I chose to go for something I was quite familiar with and whose basics I was quite proficient at.

But after that, it has been a different story altogether...

We were doing the part on Assembly Programming in our CP I (That's Computer Programming I) and all the related stuff and suddenly it hit me like a train running in full steam...I realized the amount of pains that inventors have to go through to make our interaction with the computer a lot simpler.

For example, imagine writing a program in all zeros and ones. As it is, fifteen opcodes are proving to be difficult to remember...What might happen if we have about two hundred machine level instructions to program in? It is during these moments when such thoughts come to your mind, that you truly realize that even the computer is a dumb box...which though capable of taking you on an unplanned trip to the most exotic places on this planet and beyond, is still only a result of man's superlative thinking and reasoning ability.

That's why I love computers...because they represent an inkling of man's ability to generate things that are better and more efficient than himself...because they represent the flight of man's desire and success at making things that can do what hundred men cannot do together in their lifetimes...

0 Responses: