|
Computers & the Internet - The shortest history lesson ever
As early as 1830, Sir Charles Babbage envisioned a machine which was designed to take the drudgery and inaccuracy out of processing information. As a mathematician, he knew that if all information could be converted into numbers, a machine, (steam powered of course) could compute the answer and then the numbers could be converted back into their original form. Babbage invented the principles which have become the fundamental workings of every computer in the world today.
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
In the mid 1940s, the first electronic computer was invented in the United States called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) following the working of Babbages analytical machine. Almost immediately, engineers worked on methods of enabling communication between the machines.
Tim Berners-Lee Almost 50 years of computing later in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented a method of exchanging information between groups of high energy physicists around the World. He called his invention the "World Wide Web". It is probably fair to say that Berners-Lee did not fully understand what he had made and very soon, more and more people wanted to transfer information over the web and have an opportunity to communicate across the globe faster than ever before. As technology advanced, the speed of the web became faster, computers became cheaper, and before long the Internet snowballed to become the fastest grown technology the Earth has ever seen. In just 13 years, there is so much information on the web that almost any question can be answered. We can video conference, buy and sell goods, play computer games, teach, and learn from people we have never met. Best of all is that we can do all these things, and more, with people on the other side of the planet in under a split second. |
