Imagine a classroom with twenty students in it. Each student has three pages of paper. Each piece of paper has four hundred names on each side. Each name represents a family of four. Let?s say each person in all of these families has completed five thousand math problems in their lifetime, on average (that?s one hundred ninety two thousand people). Imagine the complexity of each of these math problems was quite simple, ether addition, multiplication, division, or subtraction using numbers of nine orders of magnitude such as 294,967,296. The average computer could complete every single math problem every person in every single family named on these three pieces of paper on each one of these twenty students desks in their lifetime in one second. Assuming five thousand problems in one life time we can calculate that the computer I am talking about can do one billion thirty-two bit operations per second, much like your standard P4 or Athlon.
Computers are really powerful things! In addition to calculations, they can transfer what equates to the contents of a single book shelf to a hard disk, or the entire contents of ten full encyclopedias (including images) through memory in the time it takes to flip to the next page. What can all this power achieve? Let?s take a trip to the airport to find out? (next page)
