Mobile Computing

If you haven’t read my previous article about internet and Pc, please read it here.

(Image retrieved from: http://www.globalgrind.com)

Wikipedia defines Mobile Computing as “Human Computer Interaction by which the computer is expected to be transported during normal usage”. While the PC started taking computing machines to everyday consumer, mobile computing has really infiltrated average consumer market and revolutionized computing as a whole. Mobile computing is spreading faster than any other consumer technology in history. It has opened up new possibilities for human interaction by enabling the continuation of the computing experience regardless of geographical location. Smart phones have revolutionized not just computing but society as a whole since it’s ability to connect people in a very convenient and personal way.

Mobile computing is mainly delivered at present via smart phones and tablets; however it applies equally to PDAs, in vehicle computers, electronic readers, wearable computers etc...At present the mobile computing market is divided in to 3 main platforms namely Apple iOS, Google Android and Microsoft Windows.

Innovation in mobile computing can be categorised in to hardware, software and process. Hardware innovations can be seen around areas such as device power management, touch screens, material design for portability etc… An everyday smart watch at present is deemed to packs more computing power than the super computers that took Apollo 11 to the moon. This feat is mainly due to innovations in engineering practices such as materials, electronics and design powered by sheer competitive nature of the market. Devices on the brink of mass scale usage such as Google Glass and Agent smart watch will continue to expand the boundaries of mobile hardware technologies.

(Google glass  Image retrieved by: http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/google-glass-macro.jpg)

Although initial focus on mobile computing was mainly around its hardware, an increasing amount of attention is give to Software. Whole new software areas like mobile apps, location aware programming, and inter-device communication are developing every day thanks to the population of mobile computing. The open nature of the platforms enabling anyone with right skills to build and distribute software for mobile devices has feed the exponential adaptation of mobile computing among general public. 

Another aspect of mobile computing is its contributions to engineering and management practices such as industrial design, supply chain management and mass scale production/distribution. Global companies like Apple or Samsung are heavily dependent on a highly optimized and synchronized set of engineering and management processes to churn out quality devices in millions each day.

 Mobile computing posses its own engineering and social challenges like security, privacy, inconsistent connectivity, potential health hazards and quality of interaction. Regardless of these challenges mobile computing is expected to play a major role in the future of computing.

Internet and age of PC

Personal computers have been around here for almost 40 years and have changed the way people live in many different ways. Now we live in a society where a PC is a very common, affordable and very useful instrument that we use to carry out day to day tasks. Before 1950 the computer was considered as an instrument which can only used by highly educated people like scientists and engineers. Then computers were used for commercial purposes too. By 1955, there were only 250 computers throughout the world and in mid 1980’s 1 million personal computers had been sold.
The following graph illustrates the growth of personal computer sales from 1980 to 1984.It clearly shows the popularity of PC usage has been increased.

(Image retrieved from http://www.contactandcoil.com/tag/standards/)

There were  handful of reasons for this,

·         The size of the computer was reduced due to the use of transistors and IC (semiconductors).

·         The performance and capabilities of the pc increased dramatically.

·         With the capabilities of PCs getting increased, the reliability of the machine and the data it outputs were increased too.

·         With all these improvements one of the main reason for the popularity of computers among general public was the decrease in its price. With new semiconductor technology manufacturers were able to make more powerful computers for a much lower price. 

As the computers become an essential part of peoples’ lives, manufactures started to invest more and more in research for better technologies. As a result things like microprocessors were invented and these inventions created new pathways to other technologies like mobile phones, PDAs, embedded systems. In 2008 worlds first processor consisting of 1 billion transistors (Intel Itanium) was introduced and this is considered as a milestone of microprocessor manufacturing because it indicates an upper boundary for the development of microprocessors using conventional technologies. Please read the post in the following link to know more about the latest trends in

processor manufacturing.http://www.extremetech.com/computing/185688-ibm-betting-carbon-nanotubes-can-restore-moores-law-by-2020

(Image retrieved from http://upload.wikimedia.org)

There are other areas that was heavily influenced by PCs. Entertainment is an industry which was changed exponentially due to the use of PC. Before the emergence of PC people had very different ways of spending their leisure time. But nowadays people spend most of their free time using PCs or other technology related instruments. Computer games are one of the main uses of computers nowadays and consoles are the newest trend in gaming. And also it is estimated that the total worth of gaming industry in the world was about $105 billion dollars in 2010.It gives us a picture about how computers have changed  human lives in just few decades.

Internet and World Wide Web

Today we all are living in a world where over a billion of people in the world are connected  to each other. The Internet or the World Wide Web is a result of years of research and commitment of thousands of people. It can be considered as triumph for the whole mankind. Nowadays it’s almost impossible to carry out most of the tasks without the help of World Wide Web. Social networking, Online banking and purchasing, entertainment, communication and online education are some of the benefits of the Internet.

The predecessor of the Internet was a network called Arpanet. It was the first of its kind to use packet switching technology to transfer data. It was designed in 1969 and used 2 computers in Stanford and UCLA universities as hosts. As with this initial step, others who were interested with networking of computers began to construct other facilities like email, eBooks and web forums. But most of these activities were limited only to scientists and engineers and they weren’t used by general public until the World Wide Web emerges. In 1983 TCP/IP protocol was introduced to the Arpanet and this expanded the amount of devices that can be connected to the network. In 1984 DNS (Domain name system) was created. It’s the system that converts the numerical address of a webpage to a more human friendly humanoid phase. The importance of the IP address is that it’slike the name given to the device which is connected to the network and this helps the device to identify itself and communicate with other devices. In 1990, Tim burners Lee who proposed the World Wide Web and designed it created the World Wide Web .He introduced the current standards that used in internet like the HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), HTML (Hyper Text Mark up Language) and URL (Universal Resource Locator).The first webpage was created in 1991 and It consists of an introduction for the world wide web.  

Nowadays the internet is immensely large and no one knows how much information is out there and the location of the information that someone needs. So there are Softwares like Google, Internet Explorer to help people to find out what they want in Web. The first web browser which public could access was Mosaic which was introduced in 1993.Netscape was its competitor which was introduced in 1994.And also It was the web browser which was laid foundation for the browsers like Firefox and Safari. One of the major uses of Internet is online transactions and security related to financial transactions. In 1995 Netscape Navigator created SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and this allowed to user to do online transactions safely. Later this led to concern of online security because people found methods to steal information transmitted through internet and use them in illegal actions. Several attempts were taken to minimize this and the most efficient method was to encrypt the data, nowadays RSA encryption is wildly used to encrypt transaction details .The algorithm which is used to decrypt data was developed in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. 

(Image retrieved from http://www.cohn-family.com/encryption.htm)

In 1998 Google come into web as a search engine. Soon it becomes famous among general public because the success of its search results and it’s simple yet very effective interface. Nowadays Google is the most preferred web browser and the service provider in Internet because of the large amount facilities they are providing for the user such as Gmail, Google maps and Google drive. Google search engine is categorised as a crawler –based engine. It uses programs called crawlers to gather information about websites. The most interesting feature of the Google search engine is that it can track users and use this information to provide customized search results. Although this is a very innovative way to personalize the web experience, it has become a highly controversial topic since some people interpret this as spying on its users.

File sharing is another benefit of the internet .In 1998 the first file sharing software Napster launched. Users were able to share audio files over internet. Nowadays people can downloadmultimedia or other files directly by the host or using a torrent. With rapid advancement of modern telecommunication facilities general public have access to very high internet speed and size of the files are no longer a constraint for the users .A torrent is a way to download files through internet. It was created by a programmer called Bram Cohen in 2001.A torrents file is a small file which contains the details of various hosts that the file can be downloaded. Programs like Bit Torrent can read these files and download the same file from several sources simultaneously. But file sharing facility is a very controversial one because it directly affects the copyrights of a production. Nowadays almost any software, movie, song and other multimedia can be easily downloaded and the owners of those things won’t get any benefit for this. This is illegal by law in many countries but the file sharing keep popularising among youths.

In the first couple of decades, Internet (including Arpanet) was a place to share scientific, business and other professional ideas, knowledge and resources. Most websites were dedicated to these purposes. After 2000, things changed rapidly and the web has transformed into a more complex and diverse place. Social networking is a major component in web and the most popularized portion in the web. Social network websites like Facebook, Myspace and Google+ give opportunity for people to build relationships like never before. The impact of this new phase of the web is huge over general public when comparing to earlier stages of internet in both social and technological way. These websites are called the second generation of the websites (web2.0) because these are highly interactive and user friendly. For example, Blogs are way to represent any individual’s ideas and thoughts and to have arguments and to have conversations in cyber space. In websites like Flickr users are given space to upload their photographs and share with other people. These new technologies define the way people interact with each other.

In the next article I hope to write about a fresh trend in computing, mobile computing and the next version of the internet ,The internet of things. 

Digital era of computers(the saga of computers,part 2)

If you haven't read my previous post about the inception of computer.Please read it from here.

Before the digital computers, all computers were mechanical computers .that means the computer were built using mechanical components likes gears and wheels. They were simple machines that were capable of doing computations.

replica of the first electro-mechanical computer, Image retrieved by www.wikipedia.org

World’s first electro- mechanical was Z1 which was designed by Konrad  Zuse. These were built using Vacuum tubes that can act as a switch in electrical circuits. Z1 is the first computer that used Boolean logic for problem solving. Besides that it was the first computer to use floating point numbers in calculations. Although Z1 used many mechanical components, its design had all the components of a modern digital computer like a control unit, memory unit, and input output devices. Although its outputs weren’t highly reliable .These computer series (Z1, Z2 and Z3) helped to develop most of the theories about computing that are used nowadays. The reason for the unreliability of output data was due to the huge number of mechanical components it had. These mechanical parts mostly consist of metal plates and due to the stresses that occur inside these when in operation, the machine wasn't able to carry out given calculations precisely.

During World War 1 and 2 technological advances was increased like never before because scientists were encouraged to invent new technologies which helped some nations to win war and rise against other nations. Lots of technologies we are familiar nowadays were developed during that period including computer technology. Alan Turing, the famous mathematician who is considered as the father of modern computing laid the mathematical foundations for the digital computers. He theorized a theoretical machine called “Turing machine” which is the grandfather of modern computers, mobile phones embedded systems and almost any digital device you can think of.

During this period scientists were able to design and construct special purpose computers. They were huge machines which consumed lots of power and human effort to operate but this simpler machines were the grandfathers of modern computers. They were called special purpose since they were only built to carry out a special task. Colossus computer is an example for this type of computers. It was built by British military to decode the secret “Enigma” code  which was used in their communications. It was considered as unbreakable but with the help of his machine British army was able to read all German messages and this machine helped to end the 2^nd world war quickly saving many valuable lives.

Picture of the Colossus computer.

 These computers architecture was different to computers now a days. There wasn’t any internal memory for the computer and everything was programmed and programming this computer meant configuring it’s hardware according to the programme they are executing. This was very tedious and time consuming task. As you can see single computer needed a team of operators and only highly trained professionals like engineers or scientists were able to operate it.  

In this time computers were expensive machines due to the high price of it’s hardware ,the transistors were not available and everything was done by using vacuum tubes. As new technologies emerges scientists realised the potential of computer and they built more general purpose machines which could be programmed using softwares and carry out variety of programs .A computer called SSEM was the world’s 1^st stored program computer which was built in 1948.It was a milestone in history of computer science. ENIAC was the 1^st general purpose computer. UNIVAC 1 became the 1^st commercial computer which can be programmed according to the requirements of it’s client.(You can view more details about UNIVAC from here.)

In this time people were more focused on the hardware of the computer since they weren’t cheap and only limited number of manufacturer were there to buy them. With the progress of system design people begun to pay attention to software as well. In the beginning programming was done by using machine language and it was a very difficult task .then people began to use word phrases (mnemonics )to represent a piece of machine code and assembly language was introduced. it made programming much easier but it was still platform dependent and programmers had to programme different types of computers using different assembly languages due to this. They were called low level programming languages because they were just a more human readable version of machine language. So to solve this scientists invented more advanced and abstract programming languages like Fortran , COBOL  and C. They were platform independent and gave much freedom to the programmer to write programs to a computer without knowing it’s architecture. They are called high level languages. These languages made programming a computer much easier but still assembly is very useful since it gives more control of a computer to the programmer and no high level language can directly access hardware of a computer. These high level languages use a special program called compilers to translate the program a programmer wrote to machine code that a computer understand.

In the next post I’m hoping to write the internet era of the computers. Reading the evolution of computers is fun and enjoyable. It may sound like rubbish but there are lots of things to learn from past and we can imagine how the future generation will think about the computers that we use today and I think it won’t be very different from the picture we have in our minds towards the technology about 50 or 60 years ago.  

From stones and sticks to bits and bytes,the saga of computers

                                                                     

                                                                The above images represent the journey of humans of finding the first number systems up to the modern world of computers.You might wonder if such simple ideas have evolved up to so complex things which are the building blocks for the prosperity    of  our era.I enjoyed studying this history of how the evolution of computation happened and I am going to share some of the key milestones of that period with you as well as how might our future will be shaped by the future trends in computing.

1.1 Early history of computing

The history of computation goes back thousands of years in human history. People began counting before inventing any number system. It was crucial part of their lives. The purpose of computing was to keep records of various activities that were important for their survival. For example, a shepherd would count his sheep by matching each sheep with a stone when he take them to feed and this helped him to count them back when they return home. Gradually various civilizations came up with their own number systems and counting mechanisms. Evidence for number systems could be found in very early civilizations such as Babylonian, Egyptian and Mayans. After different societies started dealing with each other (mainly for trade purposes) each number system began enriching and gradually Hindu-Arabic number system as we know it today became the most accepted. It took a few more centuries to evolve this simple number system to a knowledge system known as mathematics today. Various mathematicians discovered and invented rules, processes and limitations in place to enhance the breath, accuracy and speed of computing power. However with the industrial revolution and the progress of technology, the demand for faster and more accurate computing came to the forefront like never before. In a period spanning not even a century, humans have achieved exponential growth in computing power and along with it grew an enormous spectrum of data. With the rapid development of computer technology, computing and manipulation of data has become the back bone of our civilization. without the aid of calculating machines or rather computers, world can’t survive for a day since almost every machine need instructions to operate and the only language they can understood is machine language consists of ones and zeros. People began counting even before they form societies or cities. The techniques were simple but sufficient for their needs. Early people only needed numbers to keep track of their resources like number of their cows, cattle, sheep etc. They simply used their fingers of their hands to match each of the units they wanted to count and if the fingers weren’t enough, they used pebbles or other similar objects to count. These methods were efficient when the number of things to count is small in quantity. But as the things get more complex, people needed faster and more reliable methods for calculation.

1.2   Invention of Abacus

(Figure1.2-Image retrieved from www.computerworld.com)

The use of Abacus spread quite rapidly among people because of it’s capability to do arithmetic far better than any other means used beforehand. The modern version of Abacus was invented in China around 1200 A.D. (A brief history of the abacus, 2013).Russia, Japan, Greece and Aztecs are the other countries and tribes that used abacus (different methods than China) for the calculations. Its ability to handle more numbers, efficiency in counting and keeping records and also the ability to use it for simple arithmetic like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division were some of the advantages of using abacus. Although it’s a mechanical device, it couldn’t do calculations by itself like calculators or computers these days, all calculations had to be done by the operator and it helped him to visualize the ongoing calculation in his mind. So the accuracy of the calculation was completely depended on the human factor.

1.3 The Pascal machine(Pascaline)

(Figure 1.3 Image retrieved from http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk)

Pascal machine was invented by famous French mathematician Blasé Pascal .It was the first successful mechanical calculating machine in 17th century. (Dave, 2007).It was a machine capable of only addition but it could perform subtraction, multiplication and division when considered subtraction as the complement of addition and multiplication as a repeated addition and division as repeated subtraction. Pascaline was consisting of rotating wheels, gears and dials and wood parts.

The purpose of the machine was to be used in tax collection. Pascal had to solve many problems due to the nature of the currency of France. Above all, the Pascaline wasn’t a very successful invention .The mechanism of the machine was a good one but to get considerable amount of accuracy, it had to be handled with great care. So eventually the reliability of the results was depend on the operator.

1.4 The Analytical machine

(Figure 3.2.1,Image retrieved from www.pcmag.com)

The analytical engine is considered as the first model of the modern electronic computer. This machine was an improvement of a previous invention called difference engine of Charles Babbage who is considered as the father of modern computing because of his innovative ideas on computing. Babbage designed this machine to be used as a programmable machine that can be customized according to the requirement rather than building machines that could only execute a specific set of instructions. Another similarity of this with digital computer was that there were separated areas for different tasks like executing commands, processing data and storing outputs and intermediate results. A punch card system was used to feed the data into it and results were displayed as plots. (The machines were intended to use for calculations of polynomials). Ada Lovelace got the chance to be the first computer programmer in history by programming the analytical engine. Besides her contribution to program the machine she had a vision that one day the machines like these can be programmed to do much more things other than mire mathematical calculations. These machines all were completely mechanical devices which weren’t even close to modern electronic computers. But the new concepts discovered along with these machines like the logical structure of a computer, separate storing of data from processing unit and the input and output methods still are accepted and valuable in computing. These machines provided the basic foundations for the early computing devices. There were some other important milestones in mechanical devices history. In 1890 the census office of America used a mechanical tabulator for the census purposes which was designed by Herman Hollerith. They were able to complete the census only in one year otherwise would take about 7 years to complete. This showed the power of artificial devices in computing and the advantages of using them in complex calculations.

I’m hoping to continue the next era of computer age ,The inception and evolution of digital computers by the next post.