As we approach the so-called ‘digital age’, more and more complex forms of technologies are invented designed to make our lives easier and fast. From beepers and telephones up to the latest tablets, iPhones and high speed computers, indeed man is continuous in developing newer forms of technologies for today’s fast paced living. The ‘computer’ according to the Free Dictionary, is an electronic device used in computation and is programmable for performing operations like surfing the internet, storing, inputting and retrieving data at high speeds. The first ‘mechanical computer’ was invented by the British mathematician, Charles Babbage in 1843 and his machine can perform complex operations than an abacus. The Countess of Lovelace, Ada Byron wrote instructions for Babbage’s machine to make it work, making her the first computer programmer in the world. However his invention was not created due to his lack of finances.
In 1945, the two Americans named John Mauchly and J. Prosper Eckert Jr. built the first proper automatic computer called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). However only two ENIAC machines alone can fill two whole rooms and weighed as much as thirty tons. It uses 200 kilowatts of electrical power to operate and their enormous size came from the fact that, ENIAC computers uses 19,000 valves per machine, each as big as a man’s hand to control switches to make it work and has thousands of combined circuitry of resistors, capacitors and inductors. ENIAC computers specializes in fields of weather predicting, ballistics, atomic energy calculation and cosmic ray studies but in the 1950’s these huge valves was replaced by tiny transistors thus making the ENIAC computers obsolete. The 1960’s gave birth to the microchips invented by engineers Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce of Intel. They used a tiny slice or chip of silicon material to make the electronic ‘brain’ of the computer and the first successful computer was developed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the late 1978 and went on sale. These computers were so expensive at first, so only few people could afford to buy them, but today computers can be found on schools, homes and offices all over the world. Today’s modern computers controls stoplights, factory operations, scans barcodes and help doctors in performing medical operations. They also monitor our banking transactions, sales inventories and track our location via GPS or Global Positioning System. A computer system has two parts: the hardware and the software. The hardware are the computer components that you can touch like the mouse, monitor, the CPU tower, speaker and keyboards whilst the software are the programs installed on the computer to perform different operation such as word processing, surfing the internet, computing and drawing. The central processing unit also known as the CPU is the control system of the computer, just like the brain of the man. The CPU communicates with the software installed into the computer system. But before a person can use the computer he must install first the OS Software or the operating system software to run the whole system and other programs. The common operating systems are: Windows versions, (Vista, XP, 8 and 7) Linux, and the Macintosh operating systems for Apple computers with different versions such as Mac 10.4 ‘Tiger’, Mac 10.5 ‘Leopard’ and its very latest operating system called Mac OS Mavericks. The Word Processor Software which allows users to input or type words for documents and projects such as MS Word, Corel WordPerfect and Open Office. Spread sheet softwares like MS Excel, Lotus and VisiCalc are used to track budgets, perform mathematical and analytical operations and used by the accountants, students and statisticians. Presentation software like the MS PowerPoint is used for ‘presenting’ data or information to the audience where one can add sounds, pictures and videos to make it more interesting to view. In the field of business, Database Management System software is used to gather information about a particular thing. These type of softwares are highly used in supermarkets, bookstores, banks and telecommunications. They are used either to track a particular book, computer, phone or an item because this contains information or data which are classified into regions, groups, sub-groups and broken down into categories. For example, in a contact center, a customer calls in to troubleshoot his or her network connection. In order for the contact center representative to assist the customer, the representative will ask the customer about his phone number, name, address and modem’s mac address and inputs the provided information into the search database. The database will then filter all the information until the information about that particular customer is pulled up. In the photography industry, special types of softwares are used in order to edit and fix common photography issues such as red-eye, over-exposure and face altering. Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks, Photo Paint and Gimp are the four of the photo software used in this field. In addition, architects, engineers and car manufacturers also use CAD or Computer Aided Design software to design buildings, bridges, cars and house interiors and because of the 3D or three dimensional effect of these programs, they are able to see what their designs might look like in the real world. Web browsers are also softwares created to surf the internet which includes, Safari for Apple workstations, IE or Internet Explorer for Windows OS although Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox can be included in the list. Skype is also a software which enables users to communicate via long distance with video and voice. It also includes free chat and phone calls to landline and individual mobile phones at any countries with data charges available. Email users also use a software in order to access email, like MacMail, Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail. The software dictates these instructions while the CPU carries out the commands by controlling millions of tiny electronic pulses every second from the software to be executed by the computer and is expressed in MHz or megahertz. The CPU must be given first an information to process through the use of input devices. The input devices are the consisted of the mouse, keyboards, and cameras along with scanners for scanning documents and microphones for the recording sounds. The stylus pen for tablets also acts as an input device for touch screen tablets and phones. The output devices includes the printer because it ‘prints out’ the file, monitors and the speakers.
Other people, use the term CPU when referring to the tall tower that houses the computer’s components whereas technically speaking, it is called the ‘tower’. The CPU is located at the heart of the computer motherboard below the electric fan to keep it cool. The ‘motherboard’ is the whole alignment of circuitry inside the computer that includes the CPU, the ROM or the Read Only Memory, RAM or Random Access Memory and the Hard Disk Drive. The difference between the ROM and the RAM is that the information on the first cannot be altered and stays with the computer even the machine is in the disabled state while information in the RAM can be altered and erased every time the computer is turned off. The files on your computer can be stored in the ROM (Hard Disk) or through the obsolete floppy disks up to the latest USB, a small carry along device that can be easily plugged into the computer’s USB ports. Similarly to a hard disk, USB flash drives stores information and can be retrieved and transfer data and files at a high speed from one’s personal computer to another. Their memory varies from the lowest 1GB (gigabyte) up to 16GB. In the 1960’s, computers are separated by many miles from each other and could only be connected through a network in order for them to work together. This is called the WWW or the World Wide Web. For the users to be able to connect to the internet, they must be subscribed to an ISP or Internet Service Providers. These are companies who supply internet connection on homes, offices and everywhere else by means of a wired or wireless connection. IP stands for Internet Protocol and all websites uses an IP address, from a pool of Internet IP addresses from the IP server. IP addresses consists of four numbers, each contains three numbers grouped into four followed by a dot (.) sequence ranging from 0 to 255. IP addresses are similar to the social security number of a person because it validates the identity of one’s computer or a website. A valid IP address might look like this: http://69.63.176.13
A URL or Uniform Resource Locator is a formatted text used to locate a specific website on the Internet. A URL consists of internet protocol or http (HyperText Transfer Protocol) which is used to transfer data, images and files on the Internet. The parts of a URL are the internet protocol, host name, a top level domain name and the sometimes the URL path name. Hence, in an example website like: http://www.facebook.com, ‘http’ is the internet protocol, the ‘www.facebook’ is the URL host name, while the top level domain is the ‘.com’ since this website is for commercial. Websites for educational or organizational category have an ‘org’ or ‘edu’ as their top level domain. The URL path name comes last after the top level domain and is used for finding specific files throughout the website. URL’s are the ‘friendly’ way to remember a website because of the name. Hence, when searching for Facebook on the Internet instead of typing the IP address http://69.63.176.13, one can just simply type the full URL: http://www.facebook.com.
The invention computer paved way to the digital age migration and allowed a much faster exchange of information from one user to another. Computers will remain as machines forever, it should not be used as a replacement for humans. Machines such as these cannot operate properly without humans operating it. Also, there is an alarming rate of young adults who use computers and the internet as their way of ‘hanging out’ with friends through the social media mainstream like Facebook and Twitter instead of seeing their friends or meet people. As I end this paper, I would like to leave a food for the thought, a quote which will definitely change our views with the computer and internet.
“I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”
-Albert Einstein
Works Cited
Books:
Brooks, Phillip. Questions and Answers: How Things Work. London: Kingfisher Publications, 2002. Print
Madgwick, Wendy. Questions and Answers: Inventions. London: Kingfisher Publications, 2000. Print
“Computers” Grolier’s Student Encyclopedia.Vol.4.Connecticut: Scholastic Library Publishing, 2004. Print
Online Sources:
Unknown. "A quote by Albert Einstein." Goodreads, 2014. Web. 12 Feb 2014. <http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/724791-i-fear-the-day-technology-will-surpass-our-human-interaction>.
Unknown. "Computer." TheFreeDictionary.com, 2014. Web. 12 Feb 2014. <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/computer>.
Works Cited:
