The Story Snail

Lesson 1 TECHNOLOGY TROUGH THE YEARS In history, people have always sought out ways to make things easier to do and to understand. This is the reason why, after so many thousands of years, a simple tool like the wheel is now more than just a wooden disk that rolls on the ground. It is also the reason why a conversation is now possible between people who are on opposite sides of the world; and why information, which used to be found only in books, can now be accessed from the Internet with a computer. Technology makes possible what was once impossible, and it is a process that will continue for as long as there are people with the desire to make things better. This section allows you to discover the reason why you need to study information technology. The Information Society Imagine life without cellular phones, computers, and television. How can you contact your friends instantly when you can't send text messages or e-mails? How can you research for the latest breakthroughs in science? How can you catch the top hits on MTV? Perhaps you can't imagine that kind of life anymore, especially now that you have realized the importance of these everyday machines and gadgets. We access loads of information through them. We rediscover the past, update the present, and even predict the future! We make use of technology to process data into useful information. It makes our work easier. Doing your homework in history, for example, is a lot easier by searching the Internet than going through all the books in the library. The last couple of centuries were full of developments in technology. One of these inventions was the computer, and it made lots of things possible. What Is IT Competency? Competency in Information Technology (IT) is the ability of an individual to understand, learn, and use software and hardware tools in data processing. This may be as basic as knowing how to use word processing software for school, or as advanced as being able to create and develop computer programs and invent ways of improving computer hardware design. Reasons for Being IT Competent Being IT competent is important for those involved in the following fields: sciences, research, engineering, health, medicine, business, education, arts, entertainment, personal computing, communication, etc. Almost every activity in these fields requires knowledge and skills in information technology. It's official: IT is everywhere. The Digital Divide Most of the people we know today have access to the Internet at home, in school, or in computer shops near us. Many students have their own personal computers and cell phones. Friends communicate by e-mail, text messages, instant messages, and "1" forum postings. How many new friends have you made through Friendster™? Despite this great technological upgrading, not everyone in the world is, or can be, IT-competent. Some places do not have Internet service providers. Some people cannot afford computers. There are regions where businesses and industries do not have e-mail or a website. A

lot still cannot afford to connect to the Net. This is the digital divide. Life Before Computers Before the arrival of computers, men had come up with creative ways to do tasks. Let's try to learn more about what happened. 1. The Number System When there were no machines for computing yet, man used what was most reasonable and available for him—his ten fingers. Our present number system, the decimal system, was based on this old practice. The decimal system utilized ten digits: zero through nine, same as the number of fingers human beings have. The name decimal comes from the Latin decem meaning "ten." The symbols for the ten digits were originally from the Hindus. They were later acquired by the Arabs who brought them to Europe around the thirteenth century. The decimal system is said to be base-10 or radix-10 because it is based on TO digits. The term radix comes from the Latin word meaning "root." At present, the base-10 numerical system is most widely used: in counting money, keeping basketball scores, and many others. Computers, on the other hand, process numbers using the binary (base-2), the octal (base-8), and the hexadecimal (base-16) number systems. 2. Computation Tools (20000 BC • 10000 BC)  Humans needed to count more items, other tools for computation. Small stones exceeded the number of toes and fingers.  Bones with scratches were also used to represent numbers. These bones were discovered in Western Europe some twenty to thirty thousand years ago, almost the same time as the first appearance of the Cro-Magnon Man. 3. The First Place-Value Number System (1900 BC)  The first known place-value number system is the Babylonians'sexagesimal system (base-60), which appeared around 1900 to 1800 BC. It is still used in measuring time (60 seconds, 60 minutes) and in dividing circles (360 degrees).  In a place-value number system, the value of a particular digit in a number depends both on the digit itself and on its position within the number. For example, in the number 25,2 is in the tens place while 5 is in the ones, that is, 2x10 + 5x1 = 25. The Invention of the Abacus (1000 BC • 500 BC)    The abacus is the first actual calculating machine known to us. Some claim the Babylonians invented it sometime between 1000 BC and 500 BC. Others say that the Chinese invented it around 1300 AD. There are several versions of the abacus. The most popular one is based on the biquinary system, which uses a combination of two bases (base-2 and base-5) to represent decimal numbers. The abacus is not considered a mechanical calculator, but it is one of the first mechanical aids.

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Human beings belong to the family tree oftetrapods, together with dinasours and hippopotamuses. A tetrapod is an animal which has hips and shoulders, fingers and toes, and has four limbs. The earliest tetrapod known is the Acanthostega, approximately 350 million years old. Acanthostega had eight fingers on each hand, which meant that if evolution didn't give us ten fingers, we would probably be using the hexadecimal system instead of the decimal system!

5. More Major Developments  The word abacus is Latin, derived from the Greek abakos, which means a "board strewn with dust on which to draw or write." This was how the original abacus looked like. The word abacus is related to the Hebrew abaq, or "dust."  After the abacus, quite a number of mechanical machines and mathematical systems were invented, the most prominent being the following (arranged according to date): a. Aristotle and the Tree of Porphyry (383 BC - 322 BC)  Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher and scientist, used a tree figure (just like a family tree) to represent the relationships between (and subdivisions of) things such as species. This diagram is known as the Tree of Porphyry. b. John Napier's Bones (1600 AD)  John Napier was a Scottish politician and mathematician. His device, called Napier's Bones, was used in the multiplication and division of large numbers. c. Wilhelm Schickard's Calculating Clock (1625 AD)  Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635), from Tuebingen, Wuerttemberg (now in Germany), made the Calculating Clock. He used wheels to carry out addition and subtraction of numbers up to 6 digits. d. Pascal's Arithmetic Machine (1640 AD)  Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician who was tired of manually adding all the data in his father's tax collection office. He then built a mechanical adding machine called the Pascaline. The Pascaline performed up to 8-digit calculations. This device, the first mechanical calculator, became well-known, and around a dozen were even sold. e. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner (1671)  Another contributor to the pre-computer era was Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a German mathematician who designed a machine that can perform all four of the basic arithmetic operations. It was called the Stepped Reckoner. This machine could multiply numbers of up to 5 and 12 digits to give a 16-digit operand. f. Joseph-Marie Jacquard's Loom (1804)  Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a French weaver, developed a weaving device that could

produce intricate designs. In 1804, he perfected this automatic loom by controlling it with punch cards a technology for storing data that was used in later computers. g. Charles Babbage's Machines (1822)  Also known as the Father of Modern Computers, Charles Babbage invented two machines: the Difference Engine (1822) and the Analytical Engine (1833)  The Difference Engine performed multiplication and division. Babbage himself never finished building his design, but a group of British engineers did in 1991.  The Analytical Engine, on the other hand, had similarities with the modern electronic digital computer. This machine could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It had a mill and a store, which corresponded to the current processor and memory, respectively. It used punch cards to print results and to serve as memory. Babbage didn't finish building this as well. h. Binary Arithmetic (1840)  Another mathematician working with Babbage developed binary arithmetic— using only two numbers, 0 and 1, for computation. She was Lady Augusta Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron. She is considered as the first programmer. i. Boolean Logic (1847)  George Boole, adopting the binary arithmetic of Lady Ada, developed the Boolean Algebra, a system of symbolic logic. The system used the two values, 0 and 1, or the conditions false and true for mathematical or logical problems. j. Hollerith's Tabulating Machine (1890)  For the 1890 US census, a competition was held to try to find a better method for tabulation. A census department employee named Herman Hollerith won. Hollerith developed a tabulating machine that used cards wherein data was punched. In 1896, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which later became IBM international Business Machines Corporation).

What's In Store for the Future? Information technology allows efficient data processing and storage, thus making large amounts of information available for our everyday tasks. In less than a century, computers have decreased in size—from them being as big as a room to something the size of a cell phone that fits in the pocket. The trend is towards smaller, more powerful computers. The Internet makes instant communication and fast transfer of data possible. Current technology includes the so-called grid computing, which is several computers connected to a network that is working on the same problem. One of the hottest stuff now in the hi-tech world is artificial intelligence (Al). Researchers are visualizing computers that can recognize pictures, emotions and touch—an attempt to make computers become more like human beings. Pretty soon, they may be able to make decisions for us.

Will these machines grow even more intelligent? Will they perhaps gain intelligence equal to a human's? Will they someday be able to replicate themselves? Some Future Possibilities In IT 1. Computer + Cell Phone = Computer  4 Phone

With computers, there is always a next level. They can always be smaller and faster. Personal computers are expected to be replaced by computer cell phones that are just as powerful. If current cell phones can already do tasks like e-mailing, encoding, ' etc., the telephone manufacturers of the future are going to completely integrate that bulky machine on your desktop with a handy personal device.

The rapid development of computer technology was not without problems. In 1945, the first computer "bug" bugged computer users. The term "bug" originated in Harvard University in 1945, when a moth was extracted from a computer and was blamed to be the cause of a hardware problem. "From then on," US Navy officer Grace Murray Hopper was quoted, "when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." 2. Nanotechnology: Smaller and Smaller Computers  Divide the diameter of a strand of human hair into 100,000 parts. One of those parts is a nanometer (1 nm=1 x10-9 meters). This is the measure that researchers have been planning to work on since 1959, upon the suggestion of the American physicist Richard Feynman. Smaller component parts mean more speed but less power required.

Future computers to be developed by nanotechnology will be characterized by paper-thin, flexible computer screens made of carbon atoms. The transistors will be made of nanotubes. Imagine wearing a complete and very powerful computer on your wrist. 3. The Need for Speed: Faster and Faster Computers  Computers and their accompanying components continue to become smaller. But this decrease in size does not come with a decrease in processing speed. New breeds of processors are able to handle vast amounts of data in a short period of time. Coupled with speedier memory access and input/output devices, you get a computer that combines main and secondary memory for great computing power. 4. More Cool Unreal Stuff  Computer games like Counterstrike and The Sims usually try to copy reality. Players are allowed to control computer-simulated situations without having to experience them in real life.  This concept can also be applied to educational training such as in medicine. Researchers look forward to computer-simulated surgical operations that students can participate in. If a "player" commits an error, he or she can just "restart" and do it again. Now, you can't do that to a live subject, can you? (This may concern those who dread that day in biology class reserved for frog dissection.)

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Now imagine taking control of this kind of technology with your own brain waves, with no need for a joystick or mouse. There is no stopping the rapid development of information technology. Soon enough, we'll find ourselves in a high-tech world full of automated gadgetry, holograms, intelligent contraptions, who knows what else? This is technology unlimited.

ROUND UP People today live in a world where computers and information technology are essential. Competency in computers is now necessary in many fields of human life. To be successful, one has to be familiar with computers. Modern civilization is possible because of the devices that were invented hundreds of years ago. They were made for specific needs and to make tasks easier. In the past fifty years, computers evolved to become faster and able to store more. New computers are coming that are expected to be more integrated into people's everyday lives, enabling more to be done.