Week Two - The Lecture

This weeks lecture was quite interesting. We heard about Charles Babbage and his first computer. From Babbage, we moved on to Alan Turing, whom completed all the 'major' computing work. From there we moved on to Apple, Xerox PARC, and the 'home brew'. This was quite interesting. Moving on, we discussed GNU/Linux, finishing on the Internet.

Babbage invented the first computer in the 19th century. It was developed to calculate and print mathematical tables. This computer, was more a machine than an electronic computer. Babbage made several of these computer parts, however even with funding, he was unable to finish it in his lifetime.

Turing, a student at Cambridge wrote a crucial paper, which clarified the possibility of a machine being able to compute numbers. And during the second world war, he worked at Bletchley Park with teams of mathematicians and cryptographers. It was here that World war II was won, as they devised the first working computer the bombe to break the secret German 'Enigma' codes. Turing also devised the turing test, which tests the artificial intelligence of a computer. It does this by sitting a judge at a computer terminal, and he communicates with a computer and a human in writing. If the judge cannot tell which is the computer, then the computer has passed the test.

The first computers commercially produced were by IBM in the 50's. They were large and extremely expensive machines, generally used for the military, government and corporate work. In 1965 Gordorn Moore realized that the capacity of a microchip has been exponentially doubling every two years. This became Moore's law, however there is concern, even by Moore himself, that this period of growth is about to end.

In the early 70's Xerox PARC developed the concept of a mouse and GUI. It was these concepts that made PC's approachable by the general public. In 1975, the first PC '0' was produced, however it had no language. Enter Bill Gates, after dropping out of Uni and moving to New Mexico, he wrote a language for this 'BASIC'. It had the abilities to do simple word processing, accounting, and play some games. This was the start of Microsoft.

Enter Apple and the 'home brew' club. The 'home brew' club was a group of computer nerds, whom got together to exchange ideas, and show off their latest home made PC's. This is where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met and started their company Apple. The Apple I, was their first PC. It had no case, mouse, or keyboard, however they sold fifty of them, each for $666.60. Realizing there was a market for PC's for the luddite, they set about making smaller components and getting funding. They managed to convince Arthur Rock at Venture Capital to back them to the tune of $100,000. Time lapse two years, and Apple II was born. Launched at the West Coast Computer Fair, the Apple II was a hit, dealers and distributors lined up to see it. Two years later, both men were worth so much, they needn't work again for the rest of their lives.

It was around this time that IBM realized that they wanted a piece of the PC craze. Determined to create a PC within a year, they changed their manufacturing processes to 'open architecture'. This meant buying stock products from other companies and putting them into a 'killer' computer. IBM had no troubles finding the hardware, however it soon became apparent that finding software was a problem. After some back and forth between the two biggest software vendors, IBM ended up with Microsoft. Gates promised an operating system, and went to Tim Patterson. They ended up buying Kudos, Patterson's program for $50 000. And in just four months, IBM had PC DOS 1.0 up and running. They licensed this out to the market, $50 a piece.

In "91 a Finnish programmer created his own version of Unix. This was the birth of GNU/Linux, he posted this up onto the internet, and hundreds of interested people contributed to the development of the software. Offering a free alternative to the other operating systems, GNU/Linux spread across the world.

The internet is a highly complex network of networks. Think of it a spiderweb being a network, then thousands of spiders webs, all connecting together, creating a network of networks. These networks were generally connected through telephone lines, however recently they are being connected through broad band cable and satellites. The internet is not to be confused with the world wide web (www.), the web however, is one way of utilizing the internet.

The 5 w's and h