I love technology. I don’t necessarily mean gadgets and (specifically) not all the rubbish that some corporations produce in an attempt to make more money, but technology in its greater sense and as a concept. The best part of all is that it provides a massive ground for education and research into every subject including the advancement of itself. This, I think, is the reason why it has come so far so quickly. It is easy to be excited about and, specifically in this case, the computers we create enable us to better simulate atomic relationships, better develop/create toolsets on the micro and nano scale and therefore better make computers.

Computers for a lot of people are just the screen, keyboard and mouse that they interface with; along with the complex and often unintuitive operating systems and software that run on them. My biggest fascination while studying was that to truly understand the computer you have to first understand the transition of an electron across a semiconductor barrier, improbable relationships, energy quanta and a variety of different elements including the very dull (but highly complex) silicon.

Building up from there you get a single transistor, which on its own is as useful as a household lighting switch. You can build these into a variety of logic gates, eventually creating processors, memories and complex control circuitry. On top of this you can start to run simple routines, make different circuits interact (which at this level is still very much in the electronics domain, with load and phase mapping and the involvement of fourrier transforms and magic numbers). On top of this you can run rudimentary ‘programs’ that can add up, subtract and shift… but not divide or multiply. You keep building through the assembler language, literally commanding the processor and being able to implement more complex mathematics.

On top of this we have languages like C, which do the same job but make it much simpler for the human in control with pre-written libraries and a syntax that doesn’t give you a headache. At this level we can start to programmatically interact with other devices, ports and streams of information. We can shade an individual pixel on the monitor red, or send a few characters to a printer. Perhaps take an input from a keyboard or mouse. Then we move onto higher level languages with their garbage collection and frameworks, making control and use of the massive resource of ‘the computer’ easy, standardised and stable.

Finally, someone can make a button which, when pressed, provides you with the words “Hello world!”. And all this overlooks the side-paths like device firmware and building the trusty BIOS or EFI.

Computing and electronics are a miracle to me and so many others, and I am absolutely convinced this is why so many people have got involved and why we have such rapid development. There is literally something for everyone in science, technology and engineering, whether they be theoretical mathematician, physicist or a business analyst. The car engine was developed and has, largely, remained as it was for a century. The improvements seen in the automotive world are nothing like those in the world of electronics, and I think it’s because people see a car moving and sort of accept “that’s it”. With electronics, while the iPod has its own little niche function, the stuff that powers it could have as easily been mechanical or driven by light. It could interface and work with a world of other systems making it better or changing it out of all recognition to be a health monitoring system.

It’s truly inspiring, for me at least. I am a member of STEMNET and the IET and I find it very easy to be an ‘ambassador’ (as is my role for the former) as I am sure you can tell. Science, technology, engineering and maths is going out of fashion in the western world, and it is very important that we at least give the new generations an opportunity to see it for what it could be and what an amazing future it could mean for them.

I will be saying more on this over at One Profession, because there is a lot more to say, but I think this is a sufficiently good overview for the casual reader!