LIE

• Course Learning Outcomes for the Lesson include creating a brief timeline of the history of Information Technology, summarizing key events in the history of information Technology, discovering the milestones of Information and Communication Technology and its impacts and issues, and explaining the role of technology in media and how it affects communication.
• The rise of information and communication technologies (ICT) – that is, computers, software, telecommunications and the internet – and the large impact that these new technologies are having on the way that society functions, have prompted many to claim that we have entered a new era, often referred to as the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’, the ‘information age’ or the ‘new economy’.
• There are many technological advances many of us assume have been with us forever, and for some of us, technology like computers have been around longer than we have.
• Most of us are more interested in advances or future enhancements than in the past.
• The study of the history of any technology is crucial because often times the original design influences a future design not always related or in the same field as the original.
• The card punch design was used to compile health information and was adopted to tabulate the 1890 Census.
• By the 1950s, punch cards lead to the development of the need for concise computer language to operate.
• Meanwhile, transistors and circuits became more sophisticated, and inventors were able to adapt the punch card language to electronic circuits.
• From the meager loom to the supercomputer, the simplicity of design leads to adaptation of the original idea to fit new applications.
• The study of history is how we rethink the old and find new applications.
• In this course, we will learn how computers become computers, its evolution, generation of computers, four basic computers periods, classification of computers, evolution of media, and media in the digital age.
• The computer was born not for entertainment or email but out of a need to solve a serious number-crunching crisis.
• By 1880, the U.S. population had grown so large that it took more than seven years to tabulate the U.S. Census results.
• The government sought a faster way to get the job done, giving rise to punch-card based computers that took up entire rooms.
• Today, we carry more computing power on our smartphones than was available in these early models.
• Charles Babbage also planned to use punch cards to direct the operations performed by the machine, an idea he picked up from seeing the results that a French weaver named Joseph Jacquard had achieved using punched cards to automatically control the patterns that would be woven into cloth by a loom.
• A lot of new technologies are developed in this era as there is a large explosion in interest with this area.
• Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, invented the Pascaline around 1642 which was a very popular mechanical computer; it used a series of wheels and cogs to add and subtract numbers.
• The mechanical age is when we first start to see connections between our current technology and its ancestors.
• The printing press made written information much more accessible to the general public by reducing the time and cost that it took to reproduce written material.
• Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, invented the movable metal-type printing process in 1450 and sped up the process of composing pages from weeks to a few minutes.
• The popular model of that time was the abacus.
• The slide rule is an early example of an analog computer — an instrument that measures instead of counts.
• The first sign of an information processor was a calculator.
• Charles Babbage eventually was forced to abandon his hopes of building the Analytical Engine, once again because of a failure to find funding.
• The discovery of ways to harness electricity was the key advance made during the electromechanical age.
• An eccentric English mathematician named Charles Babbage, frustrated by mistakes, set his mind to create a machine that could both calculate numbers and print the results.
• The discovery of a reliable method of creating and storing electricity, with a Voltaic Battery, at the end of the 18th century made possible a whole new method of communicating information.
• The telegraph was created in the early 1800s.
• In the early 1600s, William Oughtred, an English clergyman, invented the slide rule, a device that allowed the user to multiply and divide by sliding two pieces of precisely machined wood against each other.
• In the 1820s, Charles Babbage was able to produce a working model of his first attempt, the Difference Engine, which could do computations and create charts showing the squares and cubes of numbers.
• Lady Augusta Ada Byron helped Charles Babbage design the instructions that would be given to the machine on punch cards and to describe, analyze, and publicize his ideas.
• The following brief history of computing is a timeline of how computers evolved from their humble beginnings to the machines of today that surf the Internet, play games and stream multimedia in addition to crunching numbers.
• The Second Generation of Computers used transistors as their main logic elements, batch filing for input, and magnetic cores as their primary internal storage technology.
• RPA automates repetitive tasks that people used to do, including the work of financial managers, doctors, and CEOs.
• The Fourth Generation of Computers used microprocessors as their main logic elements, virtual reality for input, and magnetic cores as their primary internal storage technology.
• The First Generation of Computers used vacuum tubes as their main logic elements, punched cards to input and externally store data, and rotating magnetic drums for internal storage of data in programs written in machine language or assembly language.
• The UNIVAC and ENIAC computers are examples of first-generation computing devices.
• A computer is an electronic device that manipulates information or data, has the ability to store, retrieve, and process data, and can be used to type documents, send email, play games, and browse the Web.
• All new technologies, including computers, evolve from an original, but that doesn’t necessitate our presumption that the original no longer has a purpose or is less valued.