1. The computer age
In the nineteenth century, machines changed the world. Work changed, too, and many people got jobs in factories. It was the start of the Industrial Age.
At first, computers were very difficult to use, and only a few people understood them. Some people still say that they have never used a computer, but they probably use computers every day - they just do not realize it.
When the first computers were built in the 1940s and 1950s, they were enormous. In fact, they were as big as a room.
Over the past fifty or sixty years, computers have changed much more than people thought possible.
For thousands of years, humans have needed to count. There were many different ways to count and write down tne numbers. They could count, but they had no easy way to do calculations.
Around 1900 to 1800 BC, the Babylonians invented a new way to count which used place values. This meant that two things decided the size of a number: the digits and their position. Today, we still use place values to count.
Computers also use place values when they do calculations. They only use two digits (0 and 1).
Between 1000 and 500 BC, the Babylonians invented the abacus.
In the seventeenth century, people began to build calculating machines. In 1640, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal made an arithmetic Machine. He used it to count money. During the next ten years, Pascal made fifty more machines.
In the 1670s, a German called Leibnitz continued Pascal's work and made a better machine. Leibnitz's machine only used two digits (0 and 1) for doing calculations
3. The first computers
The word "computer" used to mean a person, not a machine. In the nineteenth century, builders and technicians needed to know the answers to very difficult calculations in order to do their work.
The people who did the calculations and wrote the books were called camputers.
In the 1820s, a British mathematician called Charles Babbage invented a machine that did very difficult calculations automatically. He called his machine a difference engine.
Babbage did not finish making the Difference Engine because he started work on a machine called an Analytical Engine. The Analutical Engine could do more: for example, it had a kind of memory. . This meant that it was possible to write programs for it, building on each answer and doing more and more difficult calculations.
A woman called Ada Lovelace worked with Babbage. Ada was an excellent mathematician and understood Babbage's ideas (most people did not). She knew that she could do amazing calculations with tne Analytical Machine, and she wrote a program for it.
Babbage's ideas were ahead of their time. Slowly, over the next one hundred years, inventors began to build better calculating machines.
4. Alan Turing
Alan Turing was born in 1912 in London. He studied mathematics at Cambridge University. In 1937, he wrote a report which talked about a Turing Machine. This was a machine that could read programs and follow any number of instructions.
In 1939, Turing began to work for the British Government. During the Second World War (1939 - 1945), the Germans often sent messages from one group of soldiers to another.
Turing worked with other mathematicians at a secret place called Bletchley Park. They knew that the Germans were using machines called Enigma machines to send messages in code.
Turing and the other people at Bletchley built a machine called the Bombe.
By 1942, the workers at Bletchley Park could read and understand all the German messages which used the Enigma code.
In 1943, the Germans started using a diferent code. In one year, they built Colossus. This was one of the world's first electronic computers which could read and understand programs.
5. The history of the PC
In 1957, IBM made a computer called the 610 Auto-Point. They said that it was the "first personal camputer". But it was not a PC like the one millions of people have in their homes today. It was large and expensive (55.000 dollars). It was called a personal computer because it only needed one person to work it. The first real PCs were not made until fifteen years later.
The first computers (like Colossus) did not have computer chips; they used glass tubes.
But in the 1960s, technicians found a way to make chips with thousands of very small transistors on them. In 1971, Intel made a computer chip called the 4004. Three years later, they made the 8080, a better and faster chip with 5.000 transistors. An American inventor called Ed Roberts used the Intel 8080 chip to make one of the first PCs.
In 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs started the Apple Computer Company.
Because today's computer chips are so fast, modern PCs can do amazing thing.
A modern PC is much faster than the very large and expensive computers from the 1970s.
6. Bill Gates and Microsoft
PCs are a very important part of life today, but in the 1970s most people did not know very much about them. One of the first people to see the future of the PC was Bill Gates.
Bill Gates was born in Seattle, USA, in 1955. He began to study computer programming at school, when he was thirteen. Later, he went to Harvard University. While he was a student there, he and a friend, Paul Allen, wrote a computer program for a new personal computer, the Altair 8800. Gates and Allen left university early and started their own company - Microsoft.
Microsoft's first big success came in 1981. Apple computers already very popular, and so the computer company IBM decided to start building PCs. They asked Bill Gates to write an Operating System for their PCs, and he wrote MS-DOS. It was not very easy to use, but it was still a big success.
In 1984, Apple made a new computer called a Macintosh. Bill Gates and Microsoft helped to write the Operating System for this computer. Más tarde, Microsoft hizo su propio sistema operativo que utiliza imágenes - que se llama Windows.
Most personal computers use the Windows Operating System, so people usually buy Microsoft software too.
7. Man versus computer
For more than a hundred years, writers have been interested in the power of machines - and what happens when they go wrong. Before computers became part of modern life, they began to appear in science fiction stories.
The idea of computers that are more pwerful than humans is interesting to scientists too. That is why IBM spent a lot of time and money building a chess computer called Deep Blue.
A lot of newspapers wrote ablout Deep Blue and Kasparov. They said that it was the beginning of a new age: computers had finally become more intelligent than humans.
Computers can follow instructions and play mathematical games very well, but are they really intelligent? Do they really think in the same way that human beings think? These are difficult questions, and scientists do not always agree on the answers.
8 The Internet
The Internet began in the 1970s as a way to send information form one computer no another. It was only used by people who worked in governments and universities. But in the 1990s, it suddenly began to be more popular.
In the early 1990s, a British man called Tim Berners-Lee invented the "Web". With the Web it was much casier to find information on the Internet, and to move from one part of the Internet to another.
In the first half of the 1990s, it was clear that the Internet and the Web were changing the world for ever. Hunderds of new companies started on the Internet. They knew that the Internet was growing, and that it offered an easy way to do business with millions of people.
Young people often know more about computing and the Internet than older people. For this reason, some very young people have had a lot of success with Internet start-up companies.
Today, almost every company in the world has got a website on the Internet. Each site has got a special name (a web address) and you use this to visit the site.
Internet users can be anywhere in the world; they just need a computer and a telephone. For this reason, it is often difficult to control what happens on the Internet.
The Internet is not only important for busines. It is also a cheap way to make contact with people from all over the world. A lot of people visit "chat rooms": in a chat room, you can "talk" to other Internet users and read their answers on your computer immediately.
9. Getting the message
Although the first email message was sent in 1971, electronic messanges began nearly two hundred years earlier. Telegraph machines used electricity to send messages along wires from one place to another.
In the 1984s, an American inventor called Samuel Morse built a better kind of telegraph which only needed one wire. He also invented a special code for messages - Morse Code.
In the 1920s, a new kind of electronic message was invented - the telex. A telex machine could send a message to any other telex machine in the world.
In the 1980s, people began to buy personal computers. Soon, it was possible to send email messages from one PC to another, but both people had to be part of the same email system.
In the 1990s, people began to use the Internet and the web. There were several different email systems, and it was not possible to send messages from one system to another.
In the late 1990s, people started to send another kind of electronic message: they used their mobile phones to send text messages. Text messages use their own kind of language.
10. Computer games
In the early 1960s, the computer campany DEC made a computer called a PDP-I. PDP-Is were large and expensive (120,000 dollars), so only companies and universities bought them. Steve Russell, a student at one of these universities wrote a piece of software for the PDP-I. It was a game for two players, and he called it Spacewar.
In the late 1960s, a programmer called Donald Woods invented a game called Adventure.
In 1971, a student called Nolan Bushmell tried to make money from the game Spacewar. People did not have PCs then, so he built a machine for bars, shopping centres, and other places where people meet. But nobody wanted to play the game.
He used his 500 dollars to start his own company, Atari, and invented a much easier game. It was a tennis game called Pong, and it was very easy to play. Computer games were here to stay.
Since the 1980s, computer games have changed a lot. Computers are much more powerful, so the games are much faster and use amazing pictures.
11. I love you (and other viruses)
A virus is a kind of computer program. It moves form one computer to another and damages the memory or other parts of the computer. Some viruses are difficult to stop; they can damage millions of computers in a very short time.
The first virus appeared in 1986. It was called Brain. In 1987, a more dangerous virus called jerusalem appeared. People knew that viruses were going to be a problem, and programmers began to write anti-virus software. Each new virus was more difficult to find, and so anti-virus software needed to get better and better.
By the early 1990s, there were more than 150 computer viruses in the world. Some of these viruses were more “intelligent” than others.
By the late 1990s, most computers were part of the email and internet systems. This meant that virus programmers could do a lot of damage very quickly.
The virus programmers are getting better all the time, but so is the anti-virus software. Some people think that viruses will do a lot more damage in the future.
12. The future
Today, there are hundreds of millions of PCs in homes all around the world. It is not easy to make predictions about computers!
Since the first computers were built in the 1940s, they have become smaller and more powerful every few years.
A lot of computer scientists are working on Artificial Intelligence. This is software which makes computers think more like humans.
There are still many things which are very easy for humans but very difficult for computers: for example, understanding language.
Soon, we will probably be able to talk to a computer in the same way that we talk to a friend.
Computer scientists are also trying to build computers which can see.
In the future, these will be much faster and more powerful than any computer that we have now. Or perhaps a different kind of computer will appear before then.
That is why it is difficult to make predictions about the future of computing: the future is often closer than you think it is.
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