Information Technology

COMPUTER HISTORY

Did you know that the first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier mechanical computers) were given this name because they performed the work that had previously been assigned to people.

“Computer” was originally a job title. It was used to describe those human beings (predominantly women) whose job was to perform the repetitive calculations required to compute such things as navigational tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for astronomical almanacs.

The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is that it aids the memory of the human performing the calculation. A skilled abacus operator can work on addition and subtraction problems at the speed of a person equipped with a hand calculator (multiplication and division are slower).

People and their inventions

The first invention that was a big help to the computer was, i think the abacus but there was no specific creator. It just originated in China.In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians. The abacus is still in use today, principally in the far east. A modern abacus consists of rings that slide over rods, but the older one pictured below dates from the time when pebbles were used for counting (the word “calculus” comes from the Latin word for pebble).

In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition. The magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand, which was originally obtained from a printed table. But Napier also invented an alternative to tables, where the logarithm values were carved on ivory sticks which are now called Napier’s Bones.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made drawings of gear-driven calculating machines but apparently never built any.

The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably the calculating clock, so named by its inventor, the German professor Wilhelm Schickard in 1623. This device got little publicity because Schickard died soon afterward in the bubonic plague.

In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could only add) but couldn’t sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they really weren’t that accurate.

COMPUTER SCIENCE

The computer has been very useful to us since the very beggining of its time. It helps make work faster and easier. It is a programable machine which receives and stores data to make an output.

The First Programmable Computer

Originally named the Z1 began development in 1936 by Germany’s Konrad Zuse in his parents living room and today is considered the first electrical binary programmable computer. The Z1 had 64-word memory (each word contained 22 bits) and a clock speed of 1Hz. To program the the Z1 required that the user insert punch tape into a punch tape reader and all output was also generated through punch tape.

The First Portable Computer (laptop)

The first truly portable computer or laptop is considered to be the Osborne I, which was released on April 1981. The Osborne I was developed by Adam Osborne and weighed 24 pounds, had a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, two 5 1/4” floppy drives, and a modem.

Parts of the Computer

That’s it

THE INTERNET

The internet is simply a network of networks. It has helped us in many things in life. Like making work faster and communication easier. Technology today really has no limits. Until now they are still finding ways to make life easier. Lets go back and know who was behind all of this.

He is a well-know person who invented this outstanding device. no other than

Tim Berners-Lee

also known as the World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as the Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks.

TCP and IP

Provided by a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or Internet Protocol (IP), enables networks to communicate with each other.

TCP provides reliable, ordered delivery of a stream of bytes from a program on one computer to another program on another computer. It simply is a communication between applications.

The IP router is responsible for routing packets across network boundaries, it is the primary protocol that establishes the Internet.

The First Web Browser

The first browser ever to be made was Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was developed by the Natinal Center for Supercomputing Applicatipons (NCSA) in the late 1992. But it wsa released in 1993, and officially discontinued development and support on January 7,1997.

Fifteen years after Mosaics introduction, the most popular contemporary browsers retain many characteristics of the original mosaic GUI and interactive experience.

These web browsers were:

Internet Explorer

- has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and IE6.[citation needed] Since its peak of popularity, its usage share has declined in the face of renewed competition from other web browsers to 55%, and is slowly trending downward.

Mozilla Firefox

- created by Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross it became the second most widely used browser with 30% of worldwide usage share of web browsers. In Germany, Firefox is the most popular browser with 60% usage.

Google

- is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine and application framework. As of January 2011, Chrome was the third most widely used browser, and passed the 10% worldwide usage share of web browsers, according to Net Applications.

Computer Viruses

A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself[1] and infect a computer. The term “virus” is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware. A true virus can spread from one computer to another when its host is taken to the target computer; for instance because a user sent it over a network or the Internet, or carried it on a removable medium such as a floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB drive.

To aid the fight against computer viruses and other types of malicious software, many security advisory organizations and developers of anti-virus software compile and publish lists of viruses