Contemporary Philippine Problems

Evolution Of Computers

The term Computer, originally meant a person capable of performing numerical calculations with the help of a mechanical computing device. The foundation stone of the development of computers was laid way back in the era before Christ. Binary arithmetic is at the core of computer systems. History of computers dates back to the invention of a mechanical adding machine in 1642. ABACUS, an early computing tool, the invention of logarithm by John Napier and the invention of slide rules by William Oughtred were significant events in the evolution of computers from these early computing devices. Here's introducing you to the ancestors of modern computers.

If you look at how computers evolved, you will notice that first generation computers made use of vacuum tubes. These computers were expensive and bulky. They used machine language for computing and could solve just one problem at a time. They did not support multitasking. Till the 1950s all computers that were used were vacuum tube based. In the 1960s, transistor based computers replaced vacuum tubes. Transistors made computers smaller and cheaper. They made computers energy-efficient. But transistors led to emission of large amounts of heat from the computer, which could damage them. The use of transistors marked the second generation of computers. Computers of this generation used punched cards for input. They used assembly language. The use of Integrated circuits ushered in the third generation of computers. Their use increased the speed and efficiency of computers. Operating systems were the human interface to computing operations and keyboards and monitors became the input-output devices. COBOL, one of the earliest computer languages, was developed in 1959-60. BASIC came out in 1964. It was designed by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz. Douglas Engelbart invented the first mouse prototype in 1963. Computers used a video display terminal (VDT) in the early days. The invention of Color Graphics Adapter in 1981 and that of Enhanced Graphics Adapter in 1984, both by IBM added 'color' to computer displays. All through the 1990s, computer monitors used the CRT technology. LCD replaced it in the 2000s. Computer keyboards evolved from the early typewriters. The development of computer storage devices started with the invention of Floppy disks, by IBM again. Thousands of integrated circuits placed onto a silicon chip made up a microprocessor. Introduction of microprocessors was the hallmark of fourth generation computers. The fifth generation computers are in their development phase. They would be capable of massive parallel processing, support voice recognition and understand natural language. The current advancements in computer technology are likely to transform computing machines into intelligent ones that possess self organizing skills. The evolution of computers will continue, perhaps till the day their processing powers equal human intelligence.

The history of the Internet began with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. The public was first introduced to the concepts that would lead to the Internet when a message was sent over the ARPANet from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock's laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), after the second piece of network equipment was installed at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I at NPL in the UK, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks.
In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, and consequently, the concept of a world-wide network of interconnected TCP/IP networks, called the Internet, was introduced. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) developed the Computer Science Network (CSNET) and again in 1986 when NSFNET provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) "phone calls", two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover over the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.[1] Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.

Internet access connects - individual computer terminals, computers, mobile devices, and computer networks to the Internet, enabling users to access Internet services (for example, email and the World Wide Web). Internet service providers (ISPs) offer Internet access to the public through various technologies that offer a wide range of data signaling rates (speeds).
Consumer use of the Internet first became popular through dial-up Internet access in the 1980s and 1990s. By the first decade of the 21st century, many consumers used faster, broadband Internet access technologies.

Types of Internet connections:

A. Dial-up Internet access - is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a dialed connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) via telephone lines. The user's computer or router uses an attached modem to encode and decode Internet Protocol packets and control information into and from analogue audio frequency signals, respectively.

B. InTegrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) - is a set of communication standards for simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data, and other network services over the traditional circuits of the public switched telephone network. It was first defined in 1988 in the CCITT red book. Prior to ISDN, the telephone system was viewed as a way to transport voice, with some special services available for data. The key feature of ISDN is that it integrates speech and data on the same lines, adding features that were not available in the classic telephone system. There are several kinds of access interfaces to ISDN defined as Basic Rate Interface (BRI), Primary Rate Interface (PRI), Narrowband ISDN (N-ISDN), and Broadband ISDN (B-ISDN).

C. Broadband Connections - Broadband refers to a communication bandwidth of at least 256 kbit/s. Each channel is 6 MHz wide and it uses an extensive range of frequencies to effortlessly relay and receive data between networks. In telecommunications, a broadband signaling method is one that handles a wide band of frequencies. Broadband is a relative term, understood according to its context. The wider (or broader) the bandwidth of a channel, the greater the information-carrying capacity, given the same channel quality.

D. Wireless Internet Connections - Wireless Internet, or wireless broadband is one of the newest Internet connection types. Instead of using telephone or cable networks for your Internet connection, you use radio frequency bands. Wireless Internet provides an always-on connection which can be accessed from anywhere — as long as you geographically within a network coverage area. Wireless access is still considered to be relatively new, and it may be difficult to find a wireless service provider in some areas. It is typically more expensive and mainly available in metropolitan areas.

The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3, commonly known as the web)
- is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks.
-The web was developed between March 1989 and December 1990. Using concepts from his earlier hypertext systems such as ENQUIRE, British engineer Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist and at that time employee of the CERN, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. The 1989 proposal was meant for a more effective CERN communication system but Berners-Lee eventually realised the concept could be implemented throughout the world. At CERN, a European research organisation near Geneva straddling the border between France and Switzerland, Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext "to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will", and Berners-Lee finished the first website in December that year. Berners-Lee posted the project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup on 7 August 1991.