THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND SYSTEMS
CHAPTER 2.1
You will be able to better understand the role and impact that information technology has had on our lives if you can look at it in a historical context
MULTI-MEDIA DEMONSTRATION TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM
Four basic periods
The Pre-Mechanical age 3,000 BC to 1450 AD
Speaking and drawing pictures
No real way to store knowledge
Based on collective memory
Named the Oral tradition
5,000 years ago that the Sumerians in Mesopotamia devised a writing system
Named CUNEIFORM
Used signs to express spoken sounds and words
2,000 BC The Phoenicians further simplified writing-true alphabet
Greeks adopted the Phoenicians alphabet and added vowels
Romans gave the letters Latin names which is the alphabet that we know today
BOOKS AND LIBRARIES
Religious leaders in Mesopotamia kept books
Collections of rectangular clay tablets inscribed with CUNEIFORM
Egyptians kept scrolls or sheets or pa-pie-rus
1,000 years later the Greeks folded the leaves of pa-pi-rus and made a book
Dictionary and the Encyclopedia created the first type of information processing through the lists of words and sorting information alphabetically
THE FIRST NUMBERING SYSTEMS
Vertical lines scratched on stone or sticks
Egyptians used 1-9 with the number ten as a U
100 and 200 AD Actually the Hindus in India that created the numbers we know today
700 years later the concept of zero was developed and the numbering system including zero made its way to Europe sometime n the 12th century
First calculators-abacus which was the first numerical information sorter
MOVIE OF MAN AGAINST THE ABACUS?
The Mechanical Age 1450-1840
Writing, pens, books and numbers were the basic building blocks that humans used to better understand the world around them
Books were still available to a limited number of people
Libraries were for the rich, the churches or governments and monarchies
The dissemination of knowledge and ides would take many, many years
For civilization to progress, information had to become more accessible to a larger portion of the population
Started to produce machines that could do some of the work that humans used to have to do themselves
The First Information Explosion
Johan Gutenberg in Mains, Germany invented the movable metal type printing press in 1450
Until then, everything was hand printed
Moveable type produced pages in minutes rather than in weeks
Thousand of copies could be made with a single run
New innovations of the printed word sprang up. Books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines
Created more democratic forms of government based on literacy and education
Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz’s machines
Early 1600’s slide rule was invented the beginning of an analog computer
Slide rule was a mainstay of science for hundreds of years
1950 Pascal, a French mathematician, invented a machine called the Pascaline. It used a series of wheels and cogs to add and subtract numbers
Babbage’s Machine
150 years later still having trouble with accurate computation
Everything from astronomy to geography relied on long mathematical tables which were prone to error
Babbage invented a machine that could calculate numbers and print the results
1820 produced a machine called the DIFFERENCE ENGINE
1830 invented the ANALYTICAL MACHINE which was remarkably like today’s computers
Similar to a modern day computer’s memory (store ) and central processing unit (mill were the numbers were manipulated)
Not until 1950’s that Babbage’s machine was rediscovered
The Electromechanical Age 1840-1940
The discovery of ways to harness electricity and that knowledge and information could be translated into electrical impulses
The Telegraph and the development of Morse Code where the alphabet could be translated into dots and dashes (bits) which were transformed into electrical impulses and transmitted over a wire
1876 Telephone by Alexander Graham Bell
The discovery that electrical waves travel through space helped Marconi to invent the Radio
These technologies form the basis of modern day telecommunication
Electromechanical Computing
United States having trouble keeping up with a census taken every 10 years
1880 the American population totaled more than 50 million people
1890 a man named Hollerith invented a machine that could automatically sort census cards into numbered categories using electrical sensing devices.
Sold the machine to the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)
IBM then funded Aiken, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University to combine the new IBM machine with Babbage’s programmable computing machine
The Electronic Age 1940-Present
Took 50 years to invent the computer as we know it today
There is disagreement on who built the first electronic digital computer
United States and in Germany using vacuum tubes, much like what is in a TV to do high speed data processing
ENIAC, EDVAC, ADSAC and UNIVAC all invented
Americans beat out the Brits with the UNIVAC, considered the world’s first commercial computer
Four Generations of Digital Computing
Last 50 years, information technology has traditionally been broken down into 4-5 distinct computer generations, each marked by the technology used to create the MAIN ELEMENT (the electronic component used to store and process information)
The First Generation 1951-1958
Used vacuum tubes as their main element
The Second Generation 1959-1963
AT&T Bell’s laboratories discovered crystalline mineral materials called semiconductors used for the main element
The Third Generation 1964-1979
Integrated transistors were replaced into integrated circuits- thousands of tiny transistors etched on a small silicon chip.
The Fourth Generation 1979-Present
The use of large scale integrated circuits (LSICs) and very large scale integrated circuits (VLSIC’s) containing hundreds of thousands to over a million transistors on one single tiny chip
and Microprocessors which contain memory, logic and control circuits (CPU) on a tiny chip
Macintosh and the IBM PC along with 4th generation software products such as Lotus 1-2-3 Word Perfect Word for Windows