History Of Information Technology

Introduction:

IT. Basically, as long as people have existed, information technology has existed because there were always ways to communicate through the technology available at the time. There are 4 main ages that divide the history of information technology. Only the last (electronic) era and part of the electromechanical era really affects us today, but it's important to know how we got to the point where we are with technology today.

Centuries

Pre-mechanical

The pre-mechanical era is the earliest era of information technology. It can be defined as the time between 3000B.C. and 1450A.D. We are talking about a long time ago. When humans first began to communicate, they would try to use simple picture language or drawings known as petroglites that were generally carved out of rock. The earliest alphabets were developed as the Phoenician alphabet.

Petroglyph

As alphabets became more popular and more people wrote information, pens and paper began to develop. It started as just marks on wet clay, but later the paper was created from the papyrus plant. The most popular type of paper made was probably by the Chinese who made paper with rags.

Now that people wrote a lot of information, they needed ways to keep everything in permanent storage. This is where the first books and libraries are developed. You have probably heard of Egyptian scrolls, which were popular ways of writing down information to keep. Some groups of people were actually joining paper in the form of a book.

Also during this period were the first numbering systems. Around 100A.D. It was when the first 1-9 system was created by people from India. However, it was not until 875A.D. (775 years later) the number 0 was invented. And yes, now that the numbers were created, people wanted to do things with them, so they created calculators. A calculator was the first sign of an information processor. The popular model of the time was the abacus.

Mechanical

The mechanical age is when we begin to see connections between our current technology and its ancestors. The mechanical age can be defined as the time between 1450 and 1840. Many new technologies are developed in this era as there is a great explosion of interest in this area. Technologies such as the slide rule were invented (an analog computer used to multiply and divide). Blaise Pascal invented Pascaline, which was a very popular mechanical computer. Charles Babbage developed the difference engine that tabulated polynomial equations using the finite difference method.

Difference Engine

Many different machines were created during this era, and while we have not yet created a machine that can do more than one type of calculation in one, like our modern calculators, we are still learning how all of our machines started in one. Also, if you look at the size of the machines invented right now compared to the power behind them, we find it absolutely ridiculous to understand why anyone would want to use them, but for the people living at the time ALL of these inventions were HUGE.

Electromechanical

The first large-scale automatic digital computer in the United States was the Mark 1 created by Harvard University around 1940. This computer was 8 feet tall, 50 feet long, 2 feet wide, and weighed 5 tons - HUGE. It was programmed using punch cards. How does your PC match this piece of metal? It was from huge machines like this that people began to consider downsizing all parts so that companies could eventually use them in their own home.

Harvard Mark 1

Electronic

There are 4 main sections of digital computing. The first was the era of vacuum tubes and punched cards like ENIAC and Mark 1. Rotating magnetic drums were used for internal storage. The second generation replaced vacuum tubes with transistors, punched cards were replaced with magnetic tape, and rotating magnetic drums were replaced with magnetic cores for internal storage. Also during this time, high-level programming languages ​​such as FORTRAN and COBOL were created. The third generation replaced transistors with integrated circuits, magnetic tape was used in all computers, and the magnetic core was converted to metal oxide semiconductors. A real operating system appeared around this time along with the advanced BASIC programming language. The fourth and last generation brought CPUs (central processing units) that contained memory, logic and control circuits, all on a single chip. The personal comptuer was developed (Apple II). The graphical user interface (GUI) was developed.

Apple ii