Lecture 2 - The history of computer and internet

The second lecture we learnt about the selective history of the computer and Internet. This should be really hard for me as I do not know any thing about it.

First, the lecturer talked about the history of computer. The computer has its origins in various adding machines, most notably Charles Babbage's 19th century Difference Engine which was designed to calculate and print mathematical tables.

Alan Turing is the people who contributed quite a lot to build the computer during the Second World War. After the War, Alan set up the foundations of modern computing, by publishing a paper on the computability of numbers and the possibility of a machine to compute them. A few other interesting fact were the development of the operating systems.by publishing a paper on the computability of numbers and the possibility of a machine to compute them.

Computers were first commercially produced by IBM in the 1950s.The first generation of computers were large, unwieldy and expensive machines for military, government and corporate work but it quickly became apparent that computers would get smaller, quicker and less expensive at an exponential rate. It wasn't until 1975, however, that the first PC (personal computer) was released by the Xerox PARC.

Then, we learnt about the history of Internet. The Internet has an age about 40 years old. People started thinking about the communication between each computers in the 1960's and then they got a way to communicate with each other, which should be quite different to the Internet in recent year. We saw a video about how the Internet connect eachPC and How the PC gets required information from the Internet.

I believe in few years later, there should have new kind of computer and the Internet should be more completed.