In the past two decades alone, we have witnessed the emergence of exciting new technologies,

including smartphones, MP3 players, digital photography, email, and the World Wide Web.
There is good reason to say we are living in the Information Age.
The two principal catalysts for the Information Age have been:

 low-cost computers
 high-speed communication networks

Figure 1.1 Low-cost computers and high-speed communication networks make possible the
products of the Information Age, such as the Samsung Note 10 Plus. It functions as a phone,
email client, Web browser, camera, video recorder, digital compass, and more.

Our relationship with technology is complicated. We create technology and choose to adopt it.
However, once we have adopted a technological device, it can transform us and how we relate to
other people and our environment. Adopting technology can change our perceptions. New
technologies are adopted to solve problems, but they often create problems.
Calculating devices have supported the development of commercial enterprises, governments,
science, and weapons. As you will see in this section, the introduction of new technologies has
often had a social impact.

 Aids to manual calculating

 Mechanical calculators
 Cash register
 Punched card tabulation
 Precursors of commercial computers
 First commercial computers
 Programming languages and time-sharing
 Transistor and integrated circuit
  IBM System/360
 Microprocessor
 Personal computer

1. Aids to Manual Calculating

Fingers and toes are handy calculation aids, but to manipulate numbers above 20, people need
more than their own digits.
The three important aids to manual calculating are:

o tablet - Simply having a tablet to write down the numbers being
manipulated is a great help. In ancient times, erasable clay and wax tablets
served this purpose. By the late Middle Ages, Europeans often used
erasable slates. Paper tablets became common in the nineteenth century,
and they are still popular today.
o abacus - is a computing aid in which a person performs arithmetic
operations by sliding counters along with rods, wires, or lines.
o mathematical tables
 Tables of logarithms (17th century) - time savers to anyone
doing complicated math because they allowed them to
multiply two numbers by simply adding their logarithms
 JohnNapier and Johannes Kepler published tables
of logarithms
 Income tax tables (today) - people who compute their
income taxes “by hand” make use of tax tables to determine
how much they owe.

However, even with them manual calculating is slow, tedious, and error-prone
 Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Tablet
Abacus

2. Mechanical Calculators
 The 17th -19th century
o Blaise Pascal - "Pascal’s calculator" - built-in 1640, was capable of
adding whole numbers containing up to six digits
o Gottfried Leibniz - "Step Reckoner" -a handcrafted machine that can
add, subtract, multiply, and divide whole numbers
o Charles Thomas de Colmar - "Arithmometer " - the first commercially
successful calculator
o Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard - "Scheutz difference engine" - the
world’s first printing calculator:
a machine capable of calculating mathematical tables and typesetting the
values onto molds.
o William Burroughs - "Burroughs Adding Machine "- devised a
practical adding machine
 Social Change -> Market for Calculators
o Gilded Age (late 19th century America)


o
 Rapid industrialization
 Economic expansion
 Concentration of corporate power
  Calculator Adoptions -> Social Change
o Fierce competition in calculator market


o
 Continuous improvements in size, speed, ease of use
 Sales increased rapidly
 The adoption of mechanical calculators led “Deskilling” and feminization of
bookkeeping
o People of average ability quite productive
o Calculators are 6´ faster than adding by hand
o Wages dropped
o Women replaced men

3. Cash register
 Store owners of late 1800s faced problems
o Keeping accurate sales records for department stores
o Preventing embezzlement from clerks
 Response to problems: cash register
 o James and John Ritty - designed an adding machine capable of
expressing values in dollars and cents
 Created printed, itemized receipts
 Maintained printed log of transactions
 Rang bell every time drawer was opened

Figure 1. Cash Register

4. Punched card tabulation

Herman Hollerith - developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to
assist in summarizing information and in accounting.
5. Precursors (Ancestors) of Commercial Computers
A team at the University of Manchester set out to build a small computer. The computer
successfully executed its first program in 1948.
The Small-Scale Experimental Machine was the first operational, fully electronic computer
system that had both programs and data stored in its memory.
Manchester Baby (Links to an external site.) replica (SSEM) at the Museum of Science and
Industry (Links to an external site.)(By Parrot of Doom - Own work, CC BY-SA
3.0, [Link] (Links to an external site.)

6. First commercial computers

Ferranti Ltd - introduced the world’s first commercial computer in 1951

 FerrantiMark 1
o a descendant of research computers constructed at the University of
Manchester

Remington-Rand

 Completed UNIVAC in 1951

 Delivered to U.S. Bureau of the Census
 Predicted winner of 1952 Pres. Election

IBM (entered the commercial market in 1953)

 Larger base of customers

 Far superior sales and marketing organization
 Greater investment in research and development
  Dominated mainframe market by mid-1960s

7. Programming Languages and Time-sharing

 Assembly language
o Symbolic representations of machine instructions
o Programs just as long as machine language programs
 FORTRAN (1957)
o First higher-level language (shorter programs)
o Designed for scientific applications
 COBOL (1959)
o U.S. Department of Defense standard
o Designed for business applications
 Time-Sharing Systems (In the early 1960s)
o Divide computer time among multiple users
o Users connect to a computer via terminals
o Cost of ownership spread among more people
o Gave many more people access to computers
 BASIC (In the early 1960s)
o Developed at Dartmouth College
o Simple, easy-to-learn programming language
o Popular language for teaching programming

8. Transistor and Integrated Circuit

 Transistor
o Replacement for vacuum tube
o Invented at Bell Labs (1948)
 Semiconductor
o Faster
o Cheaper
o More reliable
o More energy-efficient
 Integrated Circuit: Semiconductor containing transistors, capacitors, and resistors
o Advantages over parts they replaced
 Smaller
 Faster
 More reliable
 Less expensive
9. IBM System/360
 Before System/360
o IBM dominated the mainframe market in the 1960s
o IBM computers were incompatible
o Switch computers ® rewrite programs

 System/360 (1964)
o Series of 19 computers with varying levels of power
o All computers could run the same programs - Compatible
o Upgrade without rewriting programs

10. Microprocessor & Personal Computer

 Microprocessor: Computer inside a single semiconductor chip
o Invented in 1970 at Intel
o Made personal computers practical
 Example of first PCs
o Altair 8800 (1975)
o Personal computers become popular
 Apple Computer: Apple II
o Developments draw businesses to personal computers
 IBM launches IBM PC

 Discoveries in electromagnetism (early 1800s)

 Telegraph (1844)
o A telegraph is a machine used to transmit messages in the form of
electrical impulses that can be converted into data

 Telephone (1876) - invented by Alexander Graham Bell

 Typewriter and teletype (1873, 1908)
o Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule patented the first
typewriter
o In late 1873 Remington & Sons Company, famous for guns and sewing
machines, produced the first commercial typewriter.
o In 1908, the typewriter was modified to print a message transmitted
over a telegraph line; the inventors called the invention, a teletype

 Radio (1895)
 Television (1927)
 o Broadcasting video over a wire began in 1884 with the invention of an
electromechanical television by Paul Nipkow, but the first completely
electronic television transmission was made in 1927 by Philo Farnsworth.

 Remote computing (1940)

o In 1940 George Stibitz demonstrated remote computing to members of the
American Mathematical Society who were meeting at Dartmouth College
in New Hampshire. He typed numbers into the teletype, which transmitted
the data 250 miles to the calculator in New York City. After the calculator
had computed the answer, it transmitted the data back to the teletype,
which printed the result.
 ARPANET - Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (1969)
o In 1967 ARPA initiated the design and construction of the ARPANET
o first wide-area packet-switching network with distributed control and the
first network to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite
 Email (1972)
o In March 1972, Ray Tomlinson - wrote the first software enabling email
messages to be sent and received by ARPANET computers.
o A few months later, Lawrence Roberts created the first “killer app” for the
network: an email utility that gave individuals the ability to list their email
messages selectively read them, reply to them, forward them.
 Internet (1983)
o network of networks communicating using TCP/IP

 Broadband (2000)
 Broadband
o High-speed Internet connection
o At least 10x faster than a dial-up connection
o Enhanced by fiber-optic networks
o South Korea is the world leader in broadband networking.3/4 of homes
have broadband connections

This section focuses on the development of technologies to store and retrieve information.

 Newspapers
o The first English-language newspaper appeared in Great Britain in the
1600s.
 Hypertext
o In 1965, Ted Nelson coined the word hypertext, which refers to a linked
network of nodes containing information.
 The links allow readers to visit the nodes in a nonlinear
fashion
 Graphical User Interface
o Douglas Engelbart created a research lab called the Augmentation
Research which developed a hypermedia and groupware system
 called NLS (oNLine
System) Center.
 NLS system was the first to employ the practical use
of hypertext links, the mouse, raster-scan video monitors,
information organized by relevance, screen
windowing, presentation programs, and other modern
computing concepts.
 Engelbart invented several new input devices, including
the computer mouse.
o In 1970 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a new facility
dedicated to performing research into digital technology created the Alto,
a small minicomputer designed to be used by a single person.
 The Alto incorporated a bitmapped display, a keyboard, and a
mouse.
o Apple released Lisa (1983) -the first commercial computer with a GUI, or
Graphical User Interface
 The price tag was too high, the processor was too slow, and
the Lisa was not commercially successful
o Apple released the Macintosh (1984), a faster computer with a graphical
user interface.
o In May 1990 Microsoft released Windows 3.0 for IBM PCs
 World Wide Web (1990)
o Tim Berners-Lee completed the first Web browser on the NeXT
Computer (1990) - called his browser WorldWideWeb
o The first widely used Web browser was Mosaic, developed at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
o Today, the most popular web browsers


o
 Chrome
 Internet Explorer
 Firefox
 Safari
 Search Engines
o A search engine is a program that accepts a list of keywords from a user,
searches a database of documents, and returns those documents most
closely matching the specified keywords.
o There are two types of Web search engines
 Crawler-based search engines, such as Google and
AltaVista, automatically create the database of information
about Web pages.
 In a process similar to Web surfing, programs
called spiders follow hyperlinks, eventually visiting
millions of different Web pages.
  Summary information about these pages is
collected into massive databases.
 When you perform a query, the search engine
consults its database to find the closest matches.
 Human-powered search engines - The second type of Web
search engine relies upon humans to build the database of
information about various Web pages.
 People who develop a Web site can submit a
summary of their site to the keepers of the search
engine.
 The advantage of this kind of search engine is that
humans can create more accurate summaries of a
web page than a spider program. The disadvantage
of this approach is that only a small fraction of the
web can be cataloged.

Information technology (IT) refers to devices used in the creation, storage, manipulation,
exchange, and dissemination of data, including text, sound, and images.
People are making greater use of IT in their everyday lives. Some of these uses create new issues
that need to be resolved.
Let’s look at a few of the questions raised by the growth of IT.

 Email
o allows anyone to send email to anyone else with an email address
o most email traffic is spam: unsolicited, bulk, commercial email. Is spam
destroying the value of email?

 The World Wide Web has provided an unprecedented opportunity for individuals and
nongovernmental organizations to have their points of view made available to
billions.
o Will the web to be a channel for democratic ideas?
o Another tool for totalitarian governments?
 Use of credit card to purchase an item
o the credit card company now has information
o does the credit card company have a right to sell my name, address, and
phone number to other companies that may want to sell
me related products?
 Computers are now embedded in many devices on which we depend, from traffic
signals to pacemakers. Software errors have resulted in injury and even death. When
bugs result in harm to humans, what should the liability be for the people or
corporations that produced the software?
 When employees use IT devices in their work, companies can monitor their actions
closely.
o How does such monitoring affect the workplace? Does it create an
unacceptable level of stress among employees?
  IT is allowing more people than ever to work from home. What are the advantages
and disadvantages of telecommuting?
 IT capabilities are leading to changes in the IT industry.
o US-based software companies are doing more development in countries
where salaries are much lower, such as India, China, and Vietnam. Will
this trend continue? How many software jobs in the United States will be
lost to countries where labor is significantly cheaper?
 We are living in the Information Age, an era characterized by ubiquitous computing and
communication devices that have made information much easier to collect, transmit,
store, and retrieve.
 What conclusions can we draw from our study of the development of computers,
communication networks, and information storage and retrieval devices?
 First, most innovations represent simply the next step in a long staircase of evolutionary
changes. Each inventor, or team of inventors, relies upon prior work. In many cases,
different inventors come up with the same “original” idea at the same time.
 A second conclusion we can draw from these stories is that information technology did
not begin with the personal computer and the WorldWideWeb. Many other inventions,
including the telegraph, the telephone, the mechanical calculator, the radio, and the
television, led to significant social changes when they were adopted.
 Finally, with the rise of new technologies come new challenges that test our values. Is it
right to give your friends copies of the songs you have purchased? Until music was
distributed in digital form and high-bandwidth connections to the Internet became
everywhere, this wasn’t a significant issue.
 The use of new technology can have a significant impact on society, but we need to
remember that, as societies and as individuals, we have a great deal of control over how
we choose to use technology in order to maintain the values we hold to be fundamentally
important.