Computers were originally designed to perform extremely complex calculations.
Grandpa Guinee: Today, the computers have taken over for all of the uses of slide rules, adding machines, and calculators.
As time progressed, people found they could use computers to manipulate and store data as well. One current method of data storage is a CD-ROM which can hold as much information as 600 disks.1
Jay: CD-ROM which stands for Compact Disk Read Only Memory. As you can see, they look just like the standard CDs which you would put in your CD player.
Uncle Murph: CD ROM's a good modern application. People don't realize what they're getting when they go to the store and buy space invaders for their kids and they say it's a CD-ROM. They really don't appreciate what they're getting. You know, if we had CD-ROMs ten years ago, things would have been a lot different.
Jay: For example, this would be Grolliers multi-media encyclopedia right here. This contains the full text of the entire encyclopedia along with some video, sound clips, and pictures.
Uncle Murph: CD-ROMs, I think, are incredible. We bought one for my nephew, for Judy's nephew, it's called Encarta, and it's the Encyclopedia Britannica on CD-ROM. The kids don't have to go to the library; they select a topic, it has sound, it has color, it has graphs, charts, text. On one CD-ROM, the entire encyclopedia Britannica, it's incredible. And, it's fast, really, I think, pretty good. I was impressed.
Jay: It's cross linked. So, that let's say I'm looking at an article on John F. Kennedy and I want to see the Zapruder film of his assassination. I just click the appropriate button and it pulls up a little window that shows me the film. If you were to take just your standard floppy disk, you'd need, as I said, a stack of these about six feet high to deal with that.
With the development of word processing software, people have also started to use computers for text manipulation.
Aunt Kathy: All of a sudden, they were able to make the indents, they were able to use italicize, they were able to print in different colors, they were able to bold, to highlight, and really present back to the managers a finished product that made it exciting for the typists as well as the managers.
Grandma Lawlor: Now, they have everything, corrects your spelling and everything. It's amazing what they did with the typewriter today.
Aunt Kathy: For many people the word processing capabilities made typing much more creative, fun. It brought to the table easy corrections, quick rewrites, a glossy professional product when we were finished. And, all of this, all of a sudden, could be done in house. So, as a result of it, people were demanding more. They wanted a better finished product. They were looking for more quality, they were looking for faster turn around time, and that became the norm.
The word processing software on the computer has changed the way that students complete typewritten papers.
Aunt Kathy: The last experience I had typing a term paper was about a year and a half ago when I finished college going nights. I took, once again, about a sixteen- page report. We had so many different pieces to this term paper: we had diagrams and charts, we had flow charts, and we had pie charts, we had color, we had reds and greens and blues and yellows, and arrows, and we had some pages, I mean the cover page, was glossy. We would look at the paper, take it home at night, make our rewrites, go in the next day, move one paragraph up, another paragraph down, another paragraph to another page, and it just made such a nice quality finished product. We weren't afraid to make those changes because it really took no effort whatsoever, it was all in memory. It was just a matter of sitting down in front of the computer and playing around with it and making the changes we wanted. So, you never hesitated about saying "How can I make this product better." That's a big difference from my first term paper when
The development of word processing software for computers has made the presence of the typewriter almost obsolete.
Helen: Personally, I didn't realize it until I was typing my college applications. I was typing it up and I said "This is a pain in the neck. I can't believe they want me to type this out."
Aunt Kathy: I've been talking to a few people lately whose children are applying for college admissions. They're saying that their children are writing all the forms out. I said "Gee, when my girls applied to school, we made sure that everything was typed." and they said "Well, it's very hard to get their hands on a typewriter nowadays."
Helen: I had to borrow a typewriter in the CS department and type it out and that was a pain.
The development of computers has also affected how people communicate. During the Cold War, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) commissioned researchers to design a network of computers that would allow important information to still be obtained during a nuclear war.2 A computer "network" is a group of computers which are connected by wires in such a manner that they can send electronic signals to each other. This first network was called Arpanet. It was constructed in 1969 by building links between four different computer sites: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.3 The researchers designed the system so that if one of the sights was destroyed by an atomic bomb, the other three sites could continue to function.
Soon, other government and educational institutions began to connect to this computer network. These researchers used the computer network not only for its intended purpose of sharing academic information, but also for socially communicating with each other. In addition to communicating with specific individuals, Arpanet users distributed non-work related material to a group of colleagues via a science fiction mailing list.4 Over the next several years, Arpanet grew and expanded into what we now call the internet. Today, most businesses, universities, and even some private homes have connections to the internet.
Sending electronic mail (e-mail) has become a standard use of the internet. Users on the internet are identified by their e-mail addresses. An address consists of the user's name or identification number, followed by an `@' symbol, followed by the name of the recognized institution with the internet connection, followed by a `.', followed by a three letter abbreviation. For instance, my address is kguinee@princeton.edu, pronounced "kguinee at Princeton dot edu." Edu stands for education. Some other three letter abbreviations are gov for government, mil for military, com for commercial, and org for non-profit organization.5
Jim: I have friends who go to other colleges and universities. I can write them on e-mail. It's real simple.
Helen: That was the primary way I kept in touch with most of my friends, because I'm out in Boise, Idaho, I'm nowhere near any of my friends and I have e-mail to get in touch with them and most of them could e-mail me back.
Jay: I send e-mail all over the world.
Helen: My dad's on e-mail now so I mail back and forth with him to keep him up to date on what's going on. It's easier that a phone call, though my mother still prefers talking to me.
The content of e-mail messages differs depending upon the context in which the message is being sent.
Helen: I guess it's sort of like a cross between a letter and a conversation almost because you are able to answer questions better but at the same time you're still waiting for a response.
A message to someone you see frequently might be just a quick clarification of a conversation or a response to a question.
Helen: If it's someone on campus, it's very short quick dry, "What are you up to? Hey, I haven't seen you in a while. Do you want to do dinner sometime?" That's it. That's the end of it. I guess it's almost like leaving a message on an answering machine.
If the message is being sent to someone you do not see very often, the e-mail is more likely to be similar to a letter.
Helen: When I mail people who I haven't seen in a while, like I have a friend I haven't seen for about five, six years and we keep in touch by the phone and through e- mail. Usually, when I e-mail him, a lot of times it's for advice, what's going on with my life, sometimes it's just "Oh, by the way, these are my plans for the next year. What's up with you?" But, it does tend to be actually almost a letter. Those tend to be longer and longer and longer. Then, I have another friend out in Idaho. Our e-mail messages are a lot shorter to each other, rather than these long messages, then, we write to each other maybe twice a week whereas my other friend, I write to him maybe once every month, so that's a big difference. I would never write to a friend of mine using real mail even once a week.
Another method of sharing information through a computer network is called ftp, file transfer protocol. With ftp, you remotely log onto (or "telnet" in computer lingo) another computer, then download or upload files. To download a file is to transfer it from the remote computer onto your own computer. To upload a file means to transfer it from your own computer onto the remote computer. There are many large ftp sites which you can log onto as an anonymous user. From these sights you can download games, sounds, and graphics.
The games which can be downloaded are written by amateur programming enthusiasts and are usually referred to as shareware. Sometimes, the makers of the games put messages in the opening segment telling the users that if they like the game, to please send five dollars to the programmer. Other times, the programmers are less interested in money and more interested in seeing how popular their game becomes, so they ask users to send a postcard or funny picture.
The graphics which can be found on-line are usually referred to as gifs or jpegs. These words just refer to the way that the graphic was saved. A gif is a high quality picture. When a jpeg is saved, the quality and compression size of the file can be adjusted, so it is not always of as high quality as a gif. On-line you can find pictures ranging from Disney characters to Star Trek characters to famous people to nature scenes.
Some colleges are starting to use ftp to allow interested individuals to apply for admission to the school.
Helen: Georgia Tech is doing this on-line application thing for grad school and I've heard they do that for undergrad now too. It's actually a huge convenience. It's actually the reason why I decided to apply to Georgia Tech because "Gee, I can do this on-line and it's free." There's no fee if you do it on-line, where as you have to pay like $45 if I did it by the mail. So, what I did: you telnet over, and they ask you all these questions, and at the end they run it all back to you and say "Is this right?" and if you say "yes," they say "okay you submitted your application." Then, two weeks later, you get something in the mail saying "Here is a list of everything you said. Please mail this back to us with any corrections and sign the bottom. And also, here's the form for your recommendation, your three recommendation forms. And also, here's the form that we need your statement of purpose on." because I guess they don't expect you to type it all out. Although, I guess you could just ftp that.
As the internet has expanded, it has changed. The most recent development from the internet is called the World Wide Web. The internet is a series of wires and software which connect computers from all over the world. The World Wide Web is a series of documents which are located on computers on the internet. Just as each person on the internet has an e-mail address, each document on the web has an address called a URL, Universal Resource Locator.6
These documents are written in a special language called HTML, HyperText Mark-up Language. The one special thing about this language is that it enables the author of a document to make references to other documents on the web. When someone views an HTML document, the text for these references appears in a different color than the rest of the document. The viewer can use his/her mouse and click on any of these references (or "links" in computer lingo). Once the viewer clicks on the link, the computer then locates the document that the link pointed to and brings that up onto the screen.
Users can view the various documents on the World Wide Web with something called a browser. The browser allows you to select a specific URL or follow links. It also allows the user to keep a "hotlist" or "bookmarks" of favorite web pages. Whenever the user finds a page they like, they simple indicate to the browser to put it on the hotlist. The browser then stores the URL for that page, so the user can find the page again in the future.
Jay: It only really started once you've had browsers like Mosaic or Netscape that could display graphics and had very friendly user interfaces. Once that started, it's grown tremendously as people started putting video clips or artwork or sound or pictures or text on-line and because it's grown so tremendously many people want to put more stuff on-line.
Each company, school, or person on the World Wide Web has a "home page." A home page is a biography page about the author.
Helen: I wrote a home page basically after looking at a lot of other people's.
A home page may have logos or pictures, facts about the person or company, links to other pages about the author, or maybe links to other pages that the author thinks are cool.
Helen: People will mail me saying "Oh, I liked your home page." and things like that.
Just as politicians have taken advantage of the newest forms of broadcast communication in the past, they are starting to make their own pages on the World Wide Web. Currently, the White House has a home page where you can read about the latest activities, opinions, and speeches of the president, vice-president and first lady. You can even listen to a recording of Socks the cat. Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts also has a home page. When Senator Kennedy was running for re- election this past fall, he created an additional page to provide voters with information about his campaign and his views on various issues.
Sometimes people use the World Wide Web with specific goals in mind, like accessing a particular company's, school's or person's home page.
Helen: When I was applying to grad schools, I looked at a lot of their college home pages. Obviously, CS departments have home pages, usually pretty well- developed home pages. So, a lot of times I learned about their department through their home page and then would refer back to that stuff in my statement of purpose.
Jay: I may be teaching in Singapore next year. So, one of the things that I did was sitting here at Princeton, logged on to the World Wide Web and used that to take a tour of the campus because they had snapshots of various parts of the campus. I took a tour of the campus from 12,000 miles away which is I think a pretty impressive use of technology.
Helen: Once a week, I'll go double check, look for pictures jpegs and gifs, at the same sight I always go to. I double check cool sights every once in a while just to see what there is and things like that. I guess it's a form of procrastination, but I usually know exactly where I'm looking, I don't wander as much as I used to.
Other times, people "surf" the web, which means they follow various links with no particular destination in mind. I speak from experience when I say that surfing on the World Wide Web can engulf many spare hours.
Jay: You can go on for hours and hours just reading various people's information, seeing different clips, what have you. Getting back is easy because you can shut off the computer and you're back in real life.
Newsgroups or electronic bulletin boards have developed as another method of communication on the internet. There are thousands of different newsgroups on the internet, each dedicated to the discussion of a different topic. Each newsgroup has its own designated subject area that people in that group are interested in discussing. Then, within each group "threads" or conversations about an aspect of the topic will emerge. People in the newsgroups communicate by "posting" (mailing) messages to the newsgroup.
Helen: I read a few too many newsgroups that summer too. I remember looking for a pocket knife. I wanted to know what kind of pocket knife I should get. I decided I wanted a Leatherman or I wanted a Gerber, I wasn't sure which one. There was a thread going on in one of the camping newsgroups and I went through there and I looked at it. I guess I decided based on what they had to say, but a lot of people were apparently asking that same question, so that was cool. It was a good source of advice.
As they have developed, computers have become more and more a part of everyday life. In the seventies, people started to discover practical uses for computers. Employment centers built large databases of employment opportunities.7 In 1973, supermarkets started to use computer-coded labels and scanners at their check-out counters.8 General Motors put a microcomputer in its cars for the first time in 1976. This computer measured speed, the fuel level, battery level, oil pressure, and monitored the state of the engine.9 Computers have even been developed which perform non- practical tasks, such as the chess playing computer which defeated the Grand Master Peter Biyasis in 1978.10 Whether they are performing practical tasks or not, computers have become a common tool in American society.
Aunt Kathy: It's just become a very everyday piece of equipment in many homes.
Grandpa Guinee: The computer's use is multi-factional and leaves me aghast. What is being done with computers was impossible to think of in my days. It's made a whole change in many peoples lives even to the extent of people who just go into a store to purchase foods, if the computer isn't working, why everything stops. It amazes me that they will stop the sale of goods just because their computer isn't working.
Mom: I'm now teaching third grade, and just this year I got a computer to use in my classroom all day long, all year long. I also have a VCR, a laser disk, and a television in my classroom.
Computers have edged their way into our lifestyle because of their smaller, more powerful, less expensive hardware. Even after the introduction of the personal computer, computers continued to decrease in size. In 1989, Apple introduced its Powerbook, a portable Macintosh computer, which was the size of a five-subject spiral notebook and weighed about seven or eight pounds.11 IBM quickly followed suit and produced its ThinkPad.12 Apple then went a step further and released its handheld tablet-style computer the Newton MessagePad in 1993.13 As the technology improved, the processing speed of computers have grown faster. This past year, Intel released its Pentium processor, and is already working on an updated, even faster model.
Uncle Murph: I don't really know what's going to happen next. The PC is so powerful with the Pentium. The Pentium chips that we just installed a couple weeks ago, the speed of the PC is unbelievable. I mean, the least efficient machine is 66 megahertz, and it's got a gig of disk, and 16 meg memory and a full color super VGA, built in modem, it can do everything but make your lunch.
In addition to the size, power, and price of computers, the production of user friendly software has played a large role in creating a computer-filled society.
Uncle Murph: I think that the acceptance of computing didn't really come to fruition until the PC showed up because then people could touch it and kick it and feel it and feed it and you know, they could see that it could do things and it wouldn't hurt you.
Jay: I've seen computers change in several ways because when they first came out, they were a) a lot slower than they were now and b) they were so much more expensive that people didn't have them in their homes as much or they wouldn't have very powerful computers in their home.
Uncle Murph: Until that showed up, I think a lot of people had the black box syndrome, you know, "I don't want to go near that. I don't know much about computers and I'm afraid of them," People would have this aura, if you used computers, like it was magic or something.
Aunt Kathy: I have a friend who sat for five hours one Christmas morning trying to get the computer running at home and finally gave up in frustration. That doesn't happen nowadays.
Uncle Murph: I don't know why, but I think that's the big difference, the PC. It's really a computer and people see that it has more of a use than for the big federal government or the big insurance companies or manufacturing companies. They see that it has day-to-day use and that it's really pretty helpful and I think that's made it more acceptable.
In recent years, programmers have started to write "user-friendly" software. The programmers are aware that many users are not comfortable with the technical aspects of the computer, so they design graphical user interfaces for their software. This software visually represents the various computer commands and allows users to make their selection by clicking the appropriate picture. Xerox was the first company to produce a "user-friendly" interface. Then, Apple adapted the idea for its Macintosh computers which were released in 1984.14 Soon after, Microsoft began to produce Windows using the concept. Nowadays, almost all software is designed using a graphical interface.
Jay: The computers have really gotten a lot more user friendly.
Aunt Kathy: One of the advantages to word processing and computers nowadays is that it has become so user friendly.
Jay: They've now got graphical user interfaces where people can just point and click.
Aunt Kathy: It really talks you through it step by step.
Jay: Computer's have become much more a tool of the everyday person and much less a tool of the computer science geek. With the advent of computers that are friendlier and more powerful, people are starting to see the advantage of moving them into their everyday lives. This has spawned a whole new generation of people who never thought that they'd touch a computer who are at this point learning how to use them for the advantages that they can now provide.
1 Edward L. Jamieson and Barrett Seaman, eds., "Welcome to CyberSpace." Time
Spring 1995: 47.
2 Bernard Aboba, "How the Internet Came to Be." The On-line User's Encyclopedia
(Addison-Wesley, 1993).
3 "How the Internet Came to Be."
4 Bruce Sterling, "Internet." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Feb.
1993.
5 "Internet."
6 Jamieson and Seaman 47.
7 Harpur 193.
8 Harpur 197.
9 Harpur 209.
10 Harpur 216.
11 Apple Computer, Inc.
12 Poole 88.
13 Apple Computer, Inc.
14 Apple Computer, Inc.
© 1995: Kathleen Guinee, A Journey through the History of Information Technology