THE RISE OF THE COMPUTER AGE

PowerPoint Presentation

And Informative Content

Provided by

Jake Foster

Timeline Of Computers Throughout History• Includes Important events in computer history

How the Internet Began• Discusses the events leading up to the Modern Internet• Provides a 5 minute video explaining how it works

Competition for Consumers• Shows how giant corporations like Microsoft and Apple

started

What we have Today• Examines the many uses of computers in every day life• Provides important questions to be discussed

Main Menu

Computer History TimelineComputer- An electronic device for storing and

processing data, typically in binary form, according to instructions given to it in a variable program.

Computer – Electronics

Many devices through history could be considered computers.

Ancient ComputersStonehenge-Over 4500 years old, some consider Stonehenge to be a calendar that uses the sun during different times of the year to tell seasons.

Abacus- 2500 years ago, the Abacus, a memory-helping device appeared Asia Minor.

Aztec Calendar -The consisted of a 365-day agricultural calendar, as well as a 260-day sacred calendar.

Pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.

Mechanical Computers

Difference Engine- In 1786, J.H. Müller, an engineer in the Hessian army conceived the idea of what later would evolve into modern computers, the Difference Engine. This was a special machine whose purpose was to evaluate and print mathematical tables by adding sequentially the difference between certain polynomial values.

17th Century - 19th Century

Early 19th Century

The Complex Number Calculator was completed in 1939, designed by researcher George Stibitz.  In 1940, Stibitz demonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference held at Dartmouth College.  Stibitz stunned the group by performing calculations remotely on the CNC using a Teletype connected via special telephone lines. This is considered to be the first demonstration of remote access computing.

Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was completed in 1942 and was designed and built entirely by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry between 1939 and 1942. This could be considered the first Modern computer. Atanasoff was declared the originator of several basic computer ideas, but the computer as a concept was declared un-patentable and thus was freely open to all.

1940

1942

Early 19th Century 1938-1945

Konrad Zuse began work on Plankalkul (Plan Calculus), the first algorithmic programming language, with an aim of creating the theoretical preconditions for the formulation of problems of a general nature. Seven years earlier, Zuse had developed and built the world´s first binary digital computer, the Z1. He completed the first fully functional program-controlled electromechanical digital computer, the Z3, in 1941. Only the Z4 — the most sophisticated of his creations — survived World War II.

Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, the first commercially produced computer; the company´s first customer was the U.S. Navy. It held 1 million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices. Read/write heads both recorded and recovered the data. Drums eventually stored as many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a second.

1949

Later 19th Century

1958William Higinbotham created the first video game ever in 1958. His game, called "Tennis for Two," was created and played on a Brookhaven National Laboratory oscilloscope. In 1962, Steve Russell invented Spacewar! Spacewar! was the first game intended for computer use. Russell used a MIT PDP-1 mainframe computer to design his game.

In 1952, A.S. Douglas wrote his PhD degree at the University of Cambridge on Human-Computer interaction. Douglas created the first graphical computer game - a version of Tic-Tac-Toe.

1952

ERMA, the Electronic Recording Method of Accounting, digitized checking for the Bank of America by creating a computer-readable font. A special scanner read account numbers preprinted on checks in magnetic ink.

1959

Later 19th CenturyResearchers designed the Rancho Arm at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey, California as a tool for the handicapped. The Rancho Arm´s six joints gave it the flexibility of a human arm. Acquired by Stanford University in 1963, it holds a place among the first artificial robotic arms to be controlled by a computer.

1963

Online transaction processing made its debut in IBM´s SABRE reservation system, set up for American Airlines. Using telephone lines, SABRE linked 2,000 terminals in 65 cities to a pair of IBM 7090 computers, delivering data on any flight in less than three seconds.

1964

Computer-to-computer communication expanded when the Department of Defense established four nodes on the ARPANET, a resource sharing network. ARPANET´s designers set out with several goals: direct use of distributed hardware services; direct retrieval from remote, one-of-a-kind databases; and the sharing of software subroutines and packages not available on the users´ primary computer due to incompatibility of hardware or languages. The ARPANET was renamed the “Internet” in 1995.

1970

Later 19th CenturyPong war released in 1972. Nolan Bushnell created a prototype of this game in 1966 and played this game at a Magnavox product show in Burlingame, California. The game was tested in bars in Grass Valley and Sunnyvale, California where it proved very popular. Pong would revolutionize the arcade industry and launch the modern video game era.

1972

Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center designed the Alto — the first work station with a built-in mouse for input. The Alto stored several files simultaneously in windows, offered menus and icons, and could link to a local area network. Although Xerox never sold the Alto commercially, it gave a number of them to universities. Engineers later incorporated its features into work stations and personal computers.

1974

Modernizing

Thinking Machines Corporation was formed by MIT graduate student Danny Hillis and others to develop a new type of supercomputer. Their idea was to use many individual processors of moderate power rather than one extremely powerful processor. Their first machine, called The Connection Machine had 64,000 microprocessors, and began shipping in 1986.

1983

The C++ programming language emerged as the dominant object-oriented language in the computer industry.

1985

Osborne 1 is considered to be the first true portable computer or laptop. It closes-up for protection, and has a carrying handle. It even has an optional battery pack, so it doesn't have to plugged into the 110VAC outlet for power.

1981

Modernizing

The Mosaic web browser was released in 1993. Mosaic was the first commercial software that allowed graphical access to content on the internet. Designed by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputer Applications, Mosaic was originally designed for a Unix system running X-windows. By 1994, Mosaic was available for several other operating systems such as the Mac OS, Windows and AmigaOS.

Intel released the 80486 microprocessor and the i860 RISC/coprocessor chip, each of which contained more than 1 million transistors. The RISC microprocessor had a 32-bit integer arithmetic and logic unit (the part of the CPU that performs operations such as addition and subtraction), a 64-bit floating-point unit, and a clock rate of 33 MHz.

1989

1993

Origins of the InternetIn brief, in 1970, the Department of Defense founded the ARPANET which connected four computers across the U.S. to each other.

From this, computer-computer communication expanded as the ability to retrieve information that was previously not on your computer became more desirable.

Computers were quickly added to the ARPANET over the next few years.

In October 1972, a demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference was presented to the public for the first time. It was also in 1972 that electronic mail, was introduced.

In 1995, the ARPANET was renamed the Internet. By this time, the Internet was already well established as a technology supporting researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications. Over 16 million computers were connected to the internet at this time, and doubling in every year after. Today there are an estimated 2.1 billion computers connected.

The Internet in 5 Minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_LPdttKXPc&feature=player_detailpage

The contents of this five minute video will greatly help those who watch it to understand exactly what the internet is. To view, right click on the blue text and select “open hyperlink”

Consumer Competition

Microsoft Vs Apple

How did the well known computer companies of today start out, and in Microsoft's case, maintain a monopoly on computers?

Microsoft- How it startedIn the late 1970’s Bill Gates, and Paul Allen, friends and fellow dropouts from Harvard, knew that computers were the “next big thing”. They called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the Albuquerque - New Mexico company who manufactured the Altair and convinced them that they were working on a BASIC program that would work for their Altair computer - even though they did not yet have the software written! Upon completing the program by1980, IBM was on their way to creating their new personal computer and needed an Operating System for it. For this contract, Microsoft negotiated a license for a "clone" of the dominant operating system at the time: CP/M (the clone was called 86-DOS because it was designed to run on the Intel 8086 processor) from a company called Seattle Computer Products. It cost $25,000 and they then re-licensed it to IBM. Microsoft then acquired all rights to 86-DOS Operating System for only $50,000 . Bill Gates managed to convince IBM to let him retain the rights to MS-DOS and to sell it separately from the IBM personal computers with its PC-DOS. It was this wise business move that made him a computer tycoon up until now, earning huge amounts of money from the licensing of the MS-DOS. They released later versions of the system, and were intent on upgrading and improving it for a while. The interest, however, in graphical user interface or GUI, prompted them to create an add-on to MS-DOS in 1985 called "Windows". Bill Gates had created a system monopoly with the best operating system at the time.

A slice of AppleIn1976, Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I, a single-board computer. With specifications in hand and an order for 100 machines at $500 each from the Byte Shop, he and Steve Jobs got their start in business. In this photograph of the Apple I board, the upper two rows are a video terminal and the lower two rows are the computer. The 6502 microprocessor in the white package sits on the lower right. About 200 of the machines sold before the company announced the Apple II as a complete computer.

What we have TodayComputer are part of our everyday lives. They have an effect on almost everything you do. When you buy groceries at a supermarket, a computer is used with laser and barcode technology to scan the price of each item and present a total. Becoming items (clothes, food and books ) requires a computer to generate the barcode labels and maintain the inventory. Most television advertisements and many films use graphics produced by a computer. In hospitals, bedside terminals connected to the hospital's main computer allow doctors to type in orders for blood tests and to schedule operations. Banks use computers to look after their customers' money. In libraries and bookshops, computers can help you to find the book you want as quickly as possible. We have videogames- graphic induces simulations- that put the user into another world, and the list goes on and on.

What we have Today Computer Animation

Atom Colliders Artificial Intelligence

Communication

Discussion QuestionsThink of all of the technology we have now, and how long it took to reach this level. Do we as a society take this technology for granite?

How can people put this technology to better use than we are doing now?

Alternatively, How has this time-efficient technology affected the expectations of society compared to 20 years ago when this technology was just emerging?

For all its benefits, are their any major downsides to this new technology?

Do you think society could revert back to the ways before this technology if we were to suddenly loose it?

Sources

Most information on the internet came from:http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/internet-infrastructure.htmCopyright © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC. The number-one nonfiction media company.

Most information on the timeline came from:http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/© 2006 Computer History Museum. All rights reserved. 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View CA 94043    Ph 650-810-1010

Most information on Microsoft came from:http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/05/paul-allen-201105?printable=true#ixzz1I8ujyKlv