History and Future of Computers

 

For this post today I decided to talk about the history and the future of computers as I believe this is a great topic to talk about with what I have learned in the class Fundamentals of information Technology and Literacy. The fundamentals of technology all start with covering the history of it. To truly understand a topic you need to learn where something began and how it got to the point of where it is now. For example Charles Babbage invented the first mechanical computer and made it using punched cards to do it. Now of days we can perform calculate polynomial functions with the simplest devices. Then Ada Lovelace came along, and she was the first person to actual become a computer programmer. What I mean by this is that she used a document made up of Babbage’s engine and mixing it with her own notes to triple the size of the original document, The notes she used were named A-G and the G note was the first actual program because of how it detailed steps on competing the Bernoulli numbers. After 30 years of Ada’s, death Herman Hollerith created a machine that used a computer program that would summarize data and compile statistics which was later sued for the U.S Census which made the whole process take 2 years faster than what it would usually take. His invention was so grand that it stayed in use until about 1970 which in computer time is a very long time to use the same system. made another. Alan Turing is another important figure in computer history as he developed a cryptanalytic machine that could decipher any intercepted German messages. We Have him to also thank for a test for Ai called the turning test which is a test to see if a computer has actual intelligence. This is when we take a huge turn for computers, and it all starts with Grace hopper. Much later after the punch card computers in the 1940s and the 1950s we had very large rooms just for a computer which would cost more than a million dollars per system you had. Grace hopper invited a computer programing language complier, this was used to change any mathematical problems to machine code. She also gave us the term of “computer bug or debugged” as she removed a moth from the Harvard’s Mark ll computer. For a long time after that we see Moore’s Law kick in which is a law that states every two years, the microchip transistors will double its number and the price of computers will halve each time. Today we have come a long way and we have computers in the forms of servers, pcs, tablets, and smartphones. Servers typically the most expense and cost the most power put can run a lot faster than a normal computer and they are usually used to deliver webpages to other computer networks. Pcs are personal computers that can be a desktop or a laptop, They’re a lot more affordable compared to a server and are typically used to get web access. Last, we have tablet and smartphone the difference between the two is that smartphone typically can fit in one’s pocket while a tablet cannot. They are usually the most affordable options, and they consume little power to use and run slower than the other devices. Now that we know the past and present of computers we are going to learn about the possible future of all computers.  I believe in the future we will see even more devices being able to communicate with each other right now we are in this transition as we already have toasters and lightbulbs that can connect to your phone to automate tasks. We are getting closer and closer making an AI that can actually learn by itself which would bring most likely a new age of man as it would be able to solve problems that human kind isn’t able to solve just yet. It could be truly terrifying or help bring us to a golden era.

Rankin, J. L., & Moss, R. (2022, August 1). Computers rule our lives. where will they take us next? Science News. Retrieved November 20, 2022, from https://www.sciencenews.org/century/computer-ai-algorithm-moore-law-ethics#everywhere-and-invisible

By 2030, this is what computers will be able to do. World Economic Forum. (n.d.). Retrieved November 20, 2022, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/by-2030-this-is-what-computers-will-do/