History Of Computers Essay, Research Paper

Joe Koppel/Com 200

Computer Jobs will be Plentiful in the Twenty-first Century

Only once in a lifetime will a new invention come along to touch every aspect of our lives. A machine that has done all of this and more now exists in nearly every business in the US and one out of every two households. This incredible invention is of course the computer!

? How many people use computers either at home or at work?

Computers have been around us for longer than most of us think.

The electronic computer has been around for over a half-century, but its ancestors have been around 2000 years!

However, only in the last 40 years has it changed the American society. The computer has changed nearly every aspect of people’s lives.

The earliest existence of the modern computer’s ancestors is the abacus. It is simply a wooden rack holding parallel wires on which beads are strung. When these beads are moved along the wire according to “programming” rules that the user must memorize, all ordinary arithmetic operations can be performed.

In the early 1800’s a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage invented the first punch card computer. Which read holes punched into cards. This technology advanced slowly.

By the late 1930’s punch-card machines had become well established but were very slow.

The outbreak of World War II produced a desperate need for computing capability, especially for the military. New weapons were produced which needed trajectory and other essential data. Associates at the University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high-speed electronic computer to do the job. This machine became known as ENIAC, which stood for “Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator”. ENIAC was about 1,000 times faster than the previous generation of computers.

In 1947 the first wave of modern programmed electronic computers appeared. This group included computers using random access memory or “RAM”, which is a memory designed to give almost constant access to any particular piece of information.

Early in the 1950’s two important engineering discoveries changed the electronic computer field. The first computers were made with vacuum tubes, but by the late 1950’s computers were being made out of transistors, which were smaller, less expensive, more reliable, and more efficient.

In 1959 a physicist at the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, invented the integrated circuit, a tiny chip of silicon that contained an entire electronic circuit.

Gone was the bulky, unreliable machine. Now computers began to become more compact, more reliable and have more capacity. Memory storage capacities increased 800% in commercially available machines by the early 1960’s and speeds increased by an equally large margin.

A new revolution in computer hardware was now well under way, involving miniaturization of computer-logic circuitry and of component manufacture by what are called large-scale integration techniques. It was realized that “scaling down” the size of electronic digital computer circuits and parts would increase speed and efficiency and improve performance. About 1960 photoprinting of conductive circuit boards to eliminate wiring became highly developed. Then it became possible to build resistors and capacitors into circuitry by photographic means.

These advances along with many others have advanced the computer exponentially to where it is today and it would be reasonable to assume that computer technology will continue to advance in the future.

(Transition)

We are now in the midst of a global information revolution driven by the convergence and proliferation of information and communication technologies. The telecommunications sector is changing at warp speed, driven by technological innovation that results in new equipment and services and also by new entrants and alliances between companies with experience in a wide range of information industries from software to publishing. Three major trends are driving these changes:

1. The rapid introduction of new technologies and services;

2. The rapid restructuring of the telecommunications sector; and

3. Globalization of economies and of communications.

These things are all made possible by the computer

There are many powerful programs that the computer can utilize but perhaps the greatest one of all is the power of the INTERNET!

(Transition)

? How many people go online and surf the Internet?

Quite a few of us no doubt. The Internet has displaced a lot of other mediums. Lets take a look at this chart and see what has been displaced the most……….

The Internet was started by the US Department of Defense in 1969; it was called ARPANET, which stood for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It started as an experiment to link together DOD and military research including Universities doing military-funded research.

The ARPANET was so successful that every University in the country wanted to get on it. Because so many people wanted to use the net it started getting hard to manage, therefore, it was broken into two parts: MILNET, which had all the military sites, and ARPANET, which had all the nonmilitary sites. The two networks remained connected, however, thanks to a technical scheme called “Internet Protocol” or IP, which enabled traffic to be routed from one net to another as needed. Internet Protocol connects all the networks so they can all exchange messages.

Even though there were only two networks at the time, IP was made to allow thousands of networks. The IP is designed so that every computer on an IP network is compatible. That means any machine can communicate with any other machine.

The Internet, also called the net, is the world’s largest computer network, it is the network of all networks.

Use of the Internet is growing in leaps and bounds. Lets take a look at this next chart to see how many people are going online…

(2 charts)

As you can see there are a lot of people that are going online.

Perhaps the biggest user of the net is business.

Networks now link manufacturers with assembly plants, designers with factories, software engineers with hardware vendors, suppliers with retailers, retailers with customers and so on.

Customers can order anything from airline tickets to winter clothing online and do their own banking and bill paying electronically.

These trends open opportunities for innovative entrepreneurs around the world. For customers, they offer more choice and lower prices because there is no overhead cost for sales clerks and order takers.

Increasingly companies that want to compete on price will have to work smarter to reduce costs and respond to market changes, while others will have to rethink how to add value to attract customers. High levels of customer service and individualized attention are likely to become more important.

More than half the computers in U.S. offices are linked to local area networks or LANs. Increasingly, businesses are also linking into the Internet to reach counterparts in other organizations, specialized databases, and potential customers. Each month, some2,000 businesses join the more than 20,000 that have already set up “virtual shop” on the Internet.

There is a massive amount of revenue being generated on the Internet and projections show that it will grow even more in the future.

Lets take a look at this chart….

Telecommunications networks are creating a Global Information Workforce. As you can see the growth of the Internet and the revenue that it creates has led to an explosion in Information Technology worker jobs.

Some of the fields associated with Information Technology are: Software Engineers, Web Developer, PC Applications Specialists, Consultants, Data Management, Systems Analysts, plus many more related fields. The demand for Information Technology workers and the salaries that they provide are quite favorable.

Lets take a look at this chart for an illustration of salary trends in this industry.

The fastest growing career field is computer and data processing. The fastest growing jobs projected in the future are: Database Administrators /Computer Support, Computer Engineers, and Systems Analysts all of which are expected to increase by over 100% in the future.

In conclusion, it is my own opinion, that the future of Information Technology is very bright. There will continue to be bigger and better advances in technology thus creating even more career fields and demand in this sector.

I think that this will be a very rewarding career for the future.