Cyberculture:The Development of the Internet.
If we define a computer at it's most general as a device capable of carrying out calculations then the history of computing goes back at least 2,000 years or more. The abacus-a wooden rack holding horizontal wires with beads strung on them. When these beads are moved around, according to programming rules memorised by the user, all regular arithmetic problems can be done. The use of the abacus and it's gradual development had it's genesis in ancient trading routes spreading from (probably) China to the Middle East and hence to Europe along (again probably) the Silk Road.
The French mathematician after whom a third generation programming language was to be named, Blaise Pascal is usually credited for building the first digital computer in 1642. This mechanical device was developed to aid the work and hobby of Pascal's father- an employee of the State, namely a tax collector and a serious recreational gambler. Pascal's major mathematical work was in the study of probability.
Stored programme devices are later developed for the control of looms (the Jacquard Loom) in the fabric industry, not at first for calculations but for the control of repetative mechanical actions.
The English mathematics professor Charles Babbage produced a complex mechanical calculator in 1833 and started to work a yet more complex, and unfinished, machine "the Analytical Engine"many of the basic principles behind it's design underlie the modern computer. What is of interest is source of Babbage's funding for his long, and eventually failed attempted at producing a mechanical version of the modern computer. Throughout his work he was to be funded by the British Government who saw a potential for use in the calculation of ordinance trajectory-more of this point later. Most of the mathematical principals used in digital computation are evident in Babbage's devices.
Quite complex mechanical calculators are developed through the 19th century largely to serve the needs of a rapidly growing industrial and commercial market. Growing trade and industry needed accurate accounting, but data storage is not them a commercial priority.
The use of punched cards to store both instructions and data first occurs in 1890 developed by two two employees of the US Census Bureau (Herman Hollerith and James Powers) They developed devices that could read the information that had been punched into the cards automatically, without human help. Because of this, reading errors were reduced dramatically, work flow increased, and, most importantly, stacks of punched cards could be used as easily accessible memory of almost unlimited size. Furthermore, different problems could be stored on different stacks of cards and accessed when needed. For the next fifty years punched card storage was to widely used in commerce, industry and in Science. Their use in commercial computing was to be pioneered by the US calculator manufacturer International Business Machines-IBM.
The real parent of the computers we all use today was developed first in the US (despite Manchester's claims to the contrary with Collossus -a hybrid mechanical device). In 1942, John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchly, and their associates at the Moore school of Electrical Engineering of University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high - speed electronic computer. This machine became known as ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator) Just as interesting is their motivation for even attempting such a task when the end result was cumbersome to say the least. It used 18,000 vacuum tubes, about 1,800 square feet of floor space, and consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power.
ENIAC was built paid for, and operated at the request of the US military. By the beginning of Second World War weapons had become so sophisticated that they needed complex data calculations to provide trajectory tables and data. These calculations were both complex and extremely repetitive. A central characteristic of the abilities of electronic computers is that they are able carry out such calculations much more reliably than any human. Humans are far too intelligent to perform repetitive tasks at high speed and do so accurately.
It was advances in electronics that gradually brought about the idea of computers cheap and fast enough to be used in the commercial, scientific and eventually domestic environments. Valves were replaced by transistors and in the 1970s by printing or doping electronic circuits onto wafer or chips as they became known of Silicon. Many companies, such as Apple Computer and Radio Shack, introduced very successful PC's in the 1970s, encouraged in part by a fad in computer games.
In the 1980s some friction occurred in the crowded PC field, with Apple and IBM keeping strong. In the manufacturing of semiconductor chips, the Intel and Motorola Corporations were very competitive into the 1980s, although Japanese firms were making strong economic advances, especially in the area of memory chips. By the late 1980s, some personal computers were run by microprocessors that, handling 32 bits of data at a time, could process about 4,000,000 instructions per second.
Another major advance is in the area of software development. Researchers at Xerox Park in Southern California developed a GUI for use by children. This was the genesis of the WIMP environment we take for granted today. The GUI was pioneered into the area of personal computing by Apple. Indeed in lecture eight we will take a fairly detailed look at the OS (operating system software) wars that took place in both the market place and the courtroom.
The Internet or World Wide Web began as the ARPANET during the cold war in 1969. It was developed by the US Department of Defence's research people in conjunction with a number of military contractors and universities to explore the possibility of a communication network that could survive a nuclear attack. It continued simply because the Depertment, it's contractors, and the universities found that it provided a very convenient way to communicate.
For the first decade that the Internet was in existence, it was primarily used to facilitate e-mail, support online discussion groups, allow access to distant databases, and support the transfer of files between government agencies, companies and universities. From the 1960s until the 1980's many countries developed data networks and distributed computing systems
During the early 1980s, all the interconnected research networks were converted to the TCP/IP protocol (this enables all of the networks of the Internet to send data back and forth between them), and the ARPANET became the backbone (the physical connection between the major sites) of the new Internet, which comprised all TCP/IP-based networks connected to the ARPANET. This conversion to TCP/IP was completed by the end of 1983 - and the Internet was born. All data networks were, by International agreement converted to the TCP/IP protocol.
In 1990, HTML, a hypertext Internet protocol which could communicate graphical information on the Internet, was introduced. Each individual could create graphic pages (a Web site), which then became part of a huge, virtual hypertext network called the World Wide Web (WWW). The enhanced Internet was informally renamed the Web and a huge additional audience was created. HTML, developed by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN research establishment in Geneva was based on the use of hypertext to make text and graphical information available to users of disparate and incompatible computers. HTML then deliberately created an open system, that, by using browser software any user anywhere using any type of computer could gain access to. If computer operating systems were as monopolised by one supplier as they are now it is doubtful that the web would have been developed
At the moment, most people use the term "Internet" to refer to the physical structure of the Net, including client and server computers and the phone lines that connect everything. They use the term "Web" to refer to the collection of sites and the information that can be accessed when one is using the Internet.
My key point is this -throughout the history of computing major developments "leaps forward" have occurred by the intervention of the only institutions capable of commending the resources to carry out basic research and have done so to fulfil specific needs. The US Government and in particular the US military have been absolutely key in the innovations that lead to the electronic computer and to the Internet itself.
The Web may contain content by pacifistic techno-hippies and hackers, and may even seem at times to have been largely hijacked by commercial concerns, but it owes its existence to the aggressive paranoia of the Cold War.
|
|