1501ART - Tutorial Task Two Summary

A brief history of computing and the internet
Where did the computer come from?

The first ideals of the computer were derived from Charles Babbage, a graduate of Trinity College at Cambridge. Babbage was the inventor of the difference engine, which was a machine designed to calculate and print mathematical tables. Babbage became interested in evolving his machine into the analytical machine, and with the help of Lady Ada Byron, this was possible. Both Babbage and Byron were well educated in Mathematics and Science.

To bring his ideals to life, Babbage wrote an articale called "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" to which Byron annoted in her own translation. She expanded on this idea by concieving a machine which would be able to compose and play music, produce graphics and become a part of everyday use. In conjucntion to this, Ada Byron also concieved the first computer program.

The idea of computers really took off with the serious developmental work by Englishman Alan Turing. He wrote a crucial paper clarifying the computing of numbers and the possibility of machine ti compute them. After the revolutionary ideas of Turing, computers became useful during the second world war, where they were used for breaking German enigma codes.

As time went on a company called Xeroc developed the concept of the mouse, the graphical user interface, and the pull down menu, all during the 70's. These revolutionary ideas allowed personal computers of today possible and approachable by the general user. In 1975, the first P.C (Personal Computer) was released. It was large and bulky, yet still exciting in the computing world. While this was occuring, a young man by the name of Bill Gates was working with a program called Altair, and started writing the program BASIC. Thus forming his own company in his garage which is now the empire company known as Microsoft.

During the time Microsoft was in production, two men names Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were creating their own empire Apple. In an environment were several computing nerds would get together and share ideas, (Bill Gates being one of them) Jobs and Wozniak spanned off to produced the program Apple 1. This was a primitve machine with a single cuircut board, no case and no keyboard. Apple 1 was released in 1978 at the West Coast Computer Fair, 2 years after Gate's Altair. Apple grew enormously within the next two years, investing in a program called Visicale (much like word and excel) for 100 dollars.

In the 1980's, a company called IBM decided to get into the computer market. IBM was a very large slow moving company, nothing like Apple. IBM had suffiecient knowledge of hardware, but it was their lack of software that let them down. This is where Bill Gates stepped in. In conjunction with Bill Gates and Microsoft, IBM took off, and beat Apple to the released the first user friendly P.C. using WINDOWS. By the time WINDOWS 3 evolved, Apple was going under. Microsoft gained power and still remains more powerful than Apple.