this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
742 points (97.2% liked)
Greentext
3770 readers
2099 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 10 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How is software without a CPU useful? Its literally a list of instructions for a CPU.
Also a CPU can still calculate stuff if you just send electrical signals to the right connections. Software is just a way for the CPU to keep going and do more calculations with the results.
Software is algorithmic instructions. We wrote and executed algorithms by hand long before we had calculating machines; and when we did get computers that could run more complex algorithms, they didn't have CPUs. They had vacuum tubes (there were even simpler programmable purely mechanical computers before even vacuum tubes). CPUs didn't come along until much later; we'd been writing software and programming computers for decades before the first CPU.
And even if you try to argue that vacuum tubes computers had some collection of tubes that you could call a "CPU" - which would be a stretch - then it still wouldn't have been made from silicon (rocks) as in the OP post.
But before the first calculating mashing, people are writing algorithms - what software literally is - and executing them by hand long before we had calculating machines to do it for us. Look up how we calculated the ranging tables for artillery in WWII. Algorithms. Computed by hand.
The word "computer" literally comes from the word for the people (often women) who would execute algorithms using their brains to compute results.
I think you're conflating "algorithm" with "software". You're right in saying that algorithms can be computed by hand, but I don't think anyone would refer to that as "running software". The word "software" implies that it's run on "hardware", and hardware usually implies some sort of electronic (or even mechanical*) circuit, not pen and paper and a human brain.
Software runs on processing power. Doesn't matter if it's mechanical, electrical or biological computing power.
The important part is, that something is processing it.
And although by now software development through abstraction feels disconnected from just specialised algorithms: everything will break down into numbers and some form of algorithm to process the information