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.
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(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
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(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.
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