Week 2 Lecture - History of the Computer & the Internet

The History of the Computer

The first stage of the computers development started with Charles Babbage's Difference Engine which was designed in the 19th century to calculate mathematical tables. Ada Byron drew upon Babbage's work in her studies, and she envisaged a machine that could be of everyday use by playing music & producing graphics & also conceived the first computer program.

Next, Alan Turing wrote a paper discussing the idea of a machine which could compute numbers. He and a team of mathematicians and cryptographers devised the first working computer called "The Bombe" which was used to break secret German codes.

The first computers were very large & expensive machines and were only used by government, military & corporate work. Computers were not commercially produced until the 1950's when IBM entered the market.

In 1965 Gordom Moore theorised that the capacity of a microchip would double every two years. 40 years on this law is still true.

Concepts such as the mouse, a graphical user interface (GUI) and pull-down menus weren't developed until the early 70s. They came about due to a think-tank at Xerox PARC.

1975 saw the release of the first personal computer; the Altair. The main flaw with its design however was that it didn't have a language which the user could use to communicate with the computer. It was Bill Gates who came up with an answer to this problem. He dropped out of uni, moved to Albuquerque in New Mexico & wrote a computer language called BASIC for the Altair. Now, computers could be used to do word processing, basic accounting & some games. This was the start of Microsoft.

Meetings of computer hobbyists were common around this time and at one of these, Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak met & hence started Apple. Out of wanting their own personal computer to play with, they developed the Applie 1. It had no case & no keyboard & they only sold 50.

Two years after the Altair was launched the Apple 2 was released at the West Coast Computer Fair in 1978. During the next 2 years demand for the product was huge and the company grew exponentially.

In 1979 Apple bought an application from Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston at the Harvard Business School that they believed was so good, people would buy a computer just so they could use this program. They paid $100.00 for Visicalc (a virtual spreadsheet program) & the program turned out to be even more popular then they anticipated. At this time, Apple held over 50% of the market.

At this time, IBM realised that this was a market they wanted to get into. In 1980 IBM called in the help of Bill Lowe, who promised the company a product in one year. Lowe's ide realied on the concept of open architecture whereby products from a range of companies are purchased but IBM would put them together & market them as a package.

The first problem IMB faced was getting the two types of software required for a computer; the language and the operating system. So IBM set up a meeting with Bill Gates, but Microsoft only had the language, not an operating system. IBM then went to Kidall, but they would not sign a non-disclosure agreement so IBM went back to Microsoft. So Microsoft agreed to create an operating system. They bought one from Tim Patterson called Kudos and re-developed it into PC DOS 1.0.

Through the Microsoft/IBM partnership, IBM slowly gained more & more of the market share. IBM soon developed their own user-friendly icon-based graphical user interface that had made Apple so popular in the beginning, it was called Windows.

In 1991 Linus Torvalds, a Finnish programmer created his own operating system so he could try out some of his own ideas on it. He then put his operating system on the internet & it became known as GNU/Linux. This operating system is still free to download today.

The Internet

The internet is a network of networks or what is also known as an internetwork. These networks can include servers, mainframes & PC's that are interconnected by the telephone system/broad-band cables/satellite services to link people around the world to an information-sharing system.

The idea of the internet was developed by the RAND corporation in the 1960's. They developed a scheme for a communication, commarnd & control network that could survive a nuclear ware because it had no central control. At the same time, a group of researchers from the US were working on a system called "Packet Switching" which broke down messages into small chunchs & transmitted them from one computer to another. These two worked together to create the early stages of the internet.

The US Department of Defence originally funded the proget for obvious military functions however the system was hi-jacked by researchers and ARPANET was developed. It was originally used to doenload academic data but other functions such as email , Bulletin Board Servers & Multiple User Domains were soon added.

The World Wide Web

The internet is not the same thing as the Web. The Web is just one use of the internet that came about in the 1990's. The Web included all the internet sites that people have made available on servers around the world. The Web became more accessable after the invention of browers such as Netscape in the early 1990's.

To distinguish between the internet and the web, think of the internet as a collection of computers, and every website on the internet is a collection of files that exist on a computer somewhere. When you look at a website, you are just looking at only those 'webpage' files and not the other files on the computer. The internet allows us to do other things like use MSN, but MSN is not part of the Web. The Web is just websites, it is just a small part of the internet.

Cyberspace

A conceptual space where words, relationships, data, welath & power are manifested by people using computer mediated communication technologies. Cyberspace is the sum of user's imaginations as they use the internet.

Early Internet Applications

Email is a virtual mail system which sends documents from one sender to another. Mail software systems include Microsoft Outlook. However email can also be accessed via webmail providers such as Hotmail. Just about anything you can have on a computer, you can send via email. Email is often said to be a good example of an "Asynchronous" medium whereby people can send emails that the other person can read whenever they please. In this sense, email exhanges may not necessarily occur in real-time.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a system which allows you to directly upload or download files from another copmuter onto your computer. This application formed the basis for the Peet-to-Peer file sharing programs that became popular in the late 1990's such as Napster.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a real time chat system what was popular in the 1990's as it allowed people to type to eachother in real time. It is an example of Synchronous communciaton. It is mainly used for chatting but it can also be used for file transfers.

MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes etc are variants on the same kind of program, usually known as MUDs. The term MUD originally stood for Multiple User Dungeon as it was used for Dungeons & Dragons. These were the original role playing games and were text only.