A short history of computing & the Internet
Charles Babbage, son of an English banker, designed the 19th century “Difference Engine”. This was created to calculate and print mathematical tables, and even though this is one of the machines computers originated from, I must point out that it does not look much like a MacBook Pro..
The history of computing is very important for understanding where all of our fancy technology actually came from. Not that long ago the computers were massive, steam-powered, mechanical beasts and the progress from that...
...to this is in fact amazing.
A well educated metaphysician by the name of Ada Byron (Lady Lovelace) summarised an article about Babbage, and conceived not only a machine that could compose and play music, but also the very first computer program.
Still to come, was the crucial paper called “On Computable Numbers” written by another Englishman named Alan Turing. Turing worked against the Germans during the 2nd World War, and designed “The Bomb” which was intended for breaking the Germans “Enigma”-codes. Unfortunately, a lot of our technological progress is because the world wants to be able to defend its self against possible threats, such as war. This has lead to an incredible growth and development from the IBM produced computers in the 1950s and till now. So let’s look at this evolution.
In the beginning there was Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Now we still have both Steves, but we also have their very successful company, Apple.
In addition, an american named Bill Gates notised that something happened in the computer market, and started his own company, the very well known Microsoft.
Together with IBM, Gates started building an operating system, and not long after their cooperation started, they released PC DOS 1.0. He was now on his way to become the worlds richest man, and taking into concideration that they started with production of cashregisters, I think he did a very good job.
Another man worth mentioning in the history of computing, is a Finnish programmer named Linus Torvalds. The operating system he was using, missed some important components, and he created his own; the GNU/Linux.
From steam-driven to molecular manipulation in nano-scale, from analog to digital technology - the line is slightly blurry and it’s hard to put our finger on where everything actually changed, but what were the changes? In the lecture today a student mentioned networking as the biggest change, and that led us to talking about the volume of communication. The natural development from using actual written books to communicate with the public, to the massive invention of the Internet, that makes our world so much smaller. But, we have to keep in mind that the Internet is not just the World Wide Web.
The idea of the Internet came in the 1960s from RAND Corporation, and turned out to be the largest change in networking history. The Internet is the big picture, a collection of computers if you will. People seem to confuse the Web with the actual Internet, but in fact they are two very separate things. With its own terminology such as “google it”, the World Wide Web is only a little piece in the huge Internet puzzle, and it emerged in the 1990s. This is a very powerful global system, with servers containing web-pages all over the world, that provides us with huge amounts of information and the ability to communicate in efficient ways through Email, file sharing, Instant Messaging, Facebook and Twitter.
Moore's Law
Named after Gordon E. Moore, this law shows a trend in the life of commputer hardware; "The number of transistors that can be placed inexpencively on an intergrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years". Moore had a prediction in 1965 that turned out to be very precise.
TuteSpark
Three non electronic digital devices was not exactly easy to find, but this is what I came up with:
Morse Code
This is a way of transmitting information through codes.
The Abacus
A counting tool used for arithmetic processes.
The third one I thought might could have something to do with language. A way of communication that has been around for quite some time. More specific I was thinking about Braille, which is the language for people with blindness. This is numerical dot points that can be read as letters.
Further Readings
When watching the movie "Warriors of the Net", I found it really facinating how they, in a simple manner, explained how the Internet works. Terms like proxy-server, routers, switches and IP adresses is thrown out there every day, but not everybody knows what they actually mean. The short version is that a package, a link, is transmitted through stations such as firewalls, proxy servers and routers to get the information to the desired "post-office" where the package is checked, unwrapped and recycled. Since this seem like such a long process that have to be done in so little time, I am amazed that the World Wide Web isn't referred to as the "World Wide Wait" more often.
As J.P Barlow cleverly pointed out in his "The Economy of Ideas"- article, Thomas Jefferson describes an idea as a possession which is your own as long as you keep it to your self, but becomes public property as soon as it's "out there". Since the idea is a phenomena that cannot hurt you if you pass it on, ideas should float freely in the world. Barlow then goes on writing about digitalised property, and how we are going to protect and get paid for the work we do in our minds that is spread world wide through the Internet. He refers to our trip into the future as a sinking ship, which is not very optimistic, but still makes a facinating metaphor. Property law was built around other forms of media than what it now have to protect. New challenges means we have to come up with a new set of laws, despite corperations and their lawyers attempt at keeping the old ones by using force. Programmers, net-surfers and hackers are all creators of soft-property and they are well aware of the missing anchor to this floating vessel. Numerous warnings, the shutting down of web-pages and threats about leagal consecvenses is not going to stop this ship from sinking in the future.
