The computerized World

 FIRST COMPUTER

It is in 1822 when Charles Babbage and English mathematician, started to develop a project of what may then become a computer. Through the years other scientists continued working in technological advances related to computers. And the results are that during almost the last 100 years, the man had viewed how initial huge and limited computers, only used by few, started to improve in size, weight and functions and how today computers are massively used and offer consumers many incredible and really modern utilities.

It is almost impossible to define a specific inventor of the computer or which is the 1^st well-functioning computer. It may be consider that the addition of different ideas and the contribution of different inventors had contributed to create many types of computers through the last decades. USA, Britain and Germany can be the countries that had launched most important achievements.   

COMPUTER DEVELOPMENTS

1^st GENERAL-PURPOSE MECHANICAL COMPUTER CONCEPT

1837: “The Analytical Engine”. An artifact that contained an Arithmetic Logic Unit, basic flow control, and integrated memory, started to be developed, but because of money the project could not be finished (Charles Babbage’s work).

1910:  A portion of the “Analytical Engine” was completed in Britain and it could perform basic calculations.

1^st ELECTRO-MECHANICAL BINARY PROGRAMMABLE COMPUTER

1936-1938: “The Z1”. 1^st FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMABLE COMPUTER, created in Germany.

1^st ELECTRONIC DIGITAL COMPUTERS

1937-1942: “The ABC”, Atanasoff-Berry Computer. 1^ST ELECTRONIC AND AUTHOMATIC DIGITAL COMPUTER. It used vacuum tubes for digital computation including binary math and Boolean logic and had no CPU. It was developed in USA.

1943-1946: “The ENIAC”. 1^st FULLY FUNCTIONAL DIGITAL COMPUTER. It occupied about 1,800 square feet, used about 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighed nearly 50 tons. It was created in USA.

1^st ELECTRONIC DIGITAL ALL-PROGRAMMABLE COMPUTER

1943: “The COLOSSUS”. A machine created to assist the British code breakers to read encrypted messages written by the Germans.

1^st STORED PROGRAM ELECTRONIC COMPUTERS

1949:   “The EDSAC”. 1^st COMPUTER THAT RAN A GRAPHICAL COMPUTER GAME, called “Baby”. It was created in Britain.

1950-1951: “The UNIVAC 1101 or ERA 1101”. 1^st COMPUTER CAPABLE OF STORING AND RUNNING A PROGRAM FROM MEMORY. It landed and was commercialized in the USA.

COMMERCIAL DIGITAL COMPUTER

1950: “The Z4”. Developed in Switzerland. It was electromechanical, not electronic. It had 32 bits of memory with special program construction unit.

1^st PERSONAL COMPUTER “PC”

1953: “The 701 IBM IDPM”. 1^st COMMERCIAL SCIENTIFIC COMPUTER.  20 units sold ever. IBM appeared in the world of computers. Today it would be considered as a printing programmable calculator.

1^st COMPUTER WITH RAM

1955: “The Whirlwind machine”. 1^st DIGITAL COMPUTER WITH MAGNETIC CORE RAM AND REAL-TIME GRAPHICS. Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduced this incredibly innovative computer.

1^st TRANSISTOR COMPUTER

1956: “The TX-O”. 1^st TRANSISTORIZED EXPERIMENTAL COMPUTER, proven at MIT, in USA.

1^st BANK INDUSTRY COMPUTER

1959:  “The ERMA AND MICR”. electronic recording method of accounting and magnetic ink character reading.

1^st MINICOMPUTER

1963: “The UM-1NKh”. Produced in Leningrad.

1^ST PC COMMERCIALY REALLY AVAILABLE

1971: “The KENBAK-1”. 40 units sold ever.

1^st COMMERCIAL NON-KIT PERSONAL COMPUTER BASED ON A MICROPROCESSOR

1973: “The MICRAL”. Used the Intel 8008 processor.

1^st COMPUTER TO USE THE DESKTOP METAPHOR AND MOUSE-DRIVEN GRAPHICAL USER INTERFASE

1974: “The XEROX ALTO”. INCLUDED A FUNCTIONAL COMPUTER, DISPLAY AND MOUSE, it operated as many computers today, USING WINDOWS, MENUS AND ICONS as an interface to the operating system. Really innovative, but it was never sold.

1^st  LAPTOPS or PORTABLE COMPUTERS

1975: “The IBM 5100”. Weighed 55 pounds, had a 5 inch CRT display, tape drive, 1.9MHz PALM processor, and 64KB of RAM.

1981: “The OOSBORNE I”. Was the 1^st really portable computer because it weighed 24.5 pounds, with a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, two 5 1/4" floppy drives, ran the CP/M 2.2 operating system and it included a modem.

 

1986: “The IBM PC Laptop Convertible”. Weighed 12 pounds.

1^st APPLE COMPUTER SOLD

1976: “The APPLE I”.

1^st NOTEBOOK WITH AN INTAGRATED CD-ROM

1994: “The IBM THINKPAD 775CD

1^st MULTIMEDIA COMPUTER

1992: “M2500 XL/2 and M4020 SX”, computers based on the MPC standard. Released by Tandy Radio Shack.

In the last decades the world had witness and used many and many types and models of computers. Development of computer technologies runs fast and would not stop, so for future generations, first computers may seem kind of prehistoricals!

BY: ALONSO PADILLA

Sebastian Figari

Google

After the “boom” of the internet millions of web pages were created, finding the page you were looking for was very difficult and this was one of the main drawbacks of the internet. On 1996 as part of a research project for the Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to develop the technology to integrate a universal digital library, making the World Wide Web to be integrated. They first developed “Page Rank” which was the algorithm that they will later use in Google. These two friends were developing a search engine that scored the web pages according to what the user typed and showed the best results, this was how they were building Google. Later, on 1998 they formally named their company Google.Inc. By the end of that year Google Beta (what means it was still being tested) reached an index of 60 million papers.

Diagram showing the algorithm and proportion used by Google.

Google was the favorite search engine beating other engines considered “overloaded” like Yahoo or AOL. In 1999 the company established its headquarters at Palo Alto, California. With its simple design Google attracted millions of users making it the most visited web page. On 2000 Google created GoogleAds to start earning more money in order to develop more services. Google was already an internet giant and by the beginning of the 2000´s they started to offer new services like google images, gmail, google maps, etc. They also bought companies like YouTube and Picasa, by 2007 Google was the most valuable company in the world and had a value of 66,000 million dollars. Nowadays Google is one of the biggest software company and is still developing new products such as Google Glass. It’s clear that Google revolution the internet and helped to define our technology.

Sebastian Figari

Bill Gates & Microsoft

After dropping from Harvard University Gates and his friend Paul Allen started a program for a microcomputer for their just founded company “Traf-O-Data”. After releasing the program and having their first agreement with another company, the company Microsoft was founded with Bill Gates as the CEO. They were just another little company that started on a garage, but they had an enormous vision; one PC in each home of the US. In 1980 with the help of another friend of Gates, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft entered to the Operating system (OS) business. IBM puts on contact with Microsoft and a year later they were selling Microsoft´s OS on their computers.

After this, Microsoft was begging to rapidly win popularity. They needed to upgrade their OS so that more people were able to use it. This is why on 1985 they release Windows 1.0. With the year, as they earned popularity, they developed new and more effective OS´s. However, Gates was scared of new competition, who could replace the popularity of Microsoft. With the arrival of the internet Microsoft was threatened by other companies who were gaining popularity especially on the internet navigators. Microsoft played dirty with other companies for what they were taken to trial and the company almost was divided but the sanction was considered to be too hard. After their cheat on their monopoly Microsoft remained glorious as they eliminated other companies with no punishment. With not so strong competition and having the monopoly of computers Microsoft became the biggest software maker while Gates became the richest man of the planet.

Gates, with his unpredictable behaviors and business tactics was able to take his garage company into one of the largest companies in the world. He was the responsible to the world of technology we now have and all because of his wit and strong character. With the help of some friends he was able to build Microsoft and beat his starting objective: “one computer in each home”

YouTube

YouTube is one of the most “new” successful companies around the World as it was just founded in February of 2005. It was initiated and founded by three really young persons at that time, Steven Shih Chen (34 years-old now), Chad Hurley (35 years-old now) and Jawed Karim (33 years-old now). These tree entrepreneurs (a person who have the desire and skills to start up a business) worked on PayPal before, a company which concentrates on internet economic transactions and making business via internet so that should be the actual reason for how they were able to entertain people generating a whole worldwide video channel, and making money via it without charging everyone.

More specifically, YouTube is a web page which has far away more than a billion videos and has monstrous numbers like more than a billion user visits each month or a total of more than four billion hours of video being watched by month. In fact this company’s work is being a portal for videos of whatever a user (it doesn't cost anything to become a user) want’s to, the web itself contains videos from someone at a zoo watching animals (which is the actual first video of the whole YouTube, “Me at the zoo”) to music videos or sports highlights.

Now it’s pretty simple how they get money, having such statistics of views and users even per month, it’s obvious that the whole World would see any impact showed at this site. That’s why any company in the World would love to make and have their publicity imposed in this website so the World can see it and choose their product. With this it becomes a competence around the World of who can get the post advertising in YouTube (of course the one who pays better), having millionaire contracts, YouTube imposes skippable advertising of many companies and brands in many of their videos. This is able as well after Google bought this company in 2006, as we can realize that Google’s advertising engines and relations are all imposed here as well so in the end working as a team, both franchises are able to expose to the World different products.

Another way in which is in formal business channel, for example BBC. The BBC had a millionaire contract with YouTube in 2007 in which both part conclude in formalizing three BBC channels which would have different things such as entertainment and information (BBC’s work). The British company had the desire to do so as YouTube guaranteed the fact that they would reach over 70 million views per month and that would definitely mean a massive publicity for the company and all their sequels exposed here and in their own website.

Tito Vasquez

Facebook

Facebook is another of the “new” most successful companies around the World as it was founded in 2004 and has revenue (Income less added value- the price of its cost) of 5.1 billion dollars. It was founded by five Harvard University students at first as just a simple social network around the University with the purpose of relating every student and also of helping in agrouping different group projects. But then it expanded to other Boston Universities and started to spread through other universities, then to a whole bunch of high school students after then every single user which proves that he’s at least 13 years-old. The founder which had the most important role within the company and still ownes the enterprise is Mark Zuckerberg (29 years-old), after his Facebook incomes he is considered between the 100 wealthiest persons in the whole World, owning $13.3 billion.

Facebook as a website is an actual social network which has over a billion users. By being on Facebook, these users are able to relate with other users by chatting, exposing photos, commenting those, exploring others profiles (as everyone is able to use a profile in which they expose their personal information an photos of himself or whatever they like), join groups of their like, create groups of work in which they can show works and propose ideas, become a fan and follow different celebrities posts, etc. Here they can expand their friend relations and go further, laugh, enjoy, play games, in other words it’s become in this modern times, a complement for personal life, a place to make up plans, etc.

In a very similar way to YouTube, Facebook’s money is made almost fully by advertising. It’s clear that if there’s over a billion of users around Facebook, there’s an enormous global market to show your products. So there as well are millionaire contracts of advertising from massive companies around the World like Apple or Adidas, which invest their money on having a spot on Facebook’s page so if one user is using his Facebook, he would see somewhere in the page a Apple publicity. He may not be interested but their a billion more chances of people being interested so it’s a huge business, Facebook is a “market” for everyone to earn a name for their product.

Another way in which Facebook earns money is through games, the games pay lots of money to Facebook for their game to appear. For example a now very popular game, Candy Crush, payed Facebook a lot of money to impose their game. Within this game if someone likes it really much, he would be interested in buying different products or features within the game itself to upgrade their possibilities, and with that the company earns a certain amount of money and also Facebook earns a certain percentage as part of the contract.

Tito Vasquez