Assignment
Develop a timeline and paragraphs with at least 10 major events in the evolution of computers. Create your timeline utilizing PowerPoint or an online web development tool such as Weebly, Wix, or Webs. Within your project, include at least one short (1-2 paragraphs) story of interest and a biography of at least one influential person. Include all your references where you got the information. You may use pictures or videos that will enhance your product.
Now that you have learned a lot about the history of information technology, create a timeline that covers all of the key topics from 3000B.C. to the present. Make sure to seperate your timeline into the 4 different ages and include all of the technologies covered in the lesson AS WELL as other key technologies you research online. Your timeline can be in the form of a website, powerpoint, or anything you find to be creative.
QuestionsDirections: Answer each of the questions after reading the article above. Write in complete sentences. You must think and be creative with your answers.
Directions:
Answer each of the questions after reading the article above. Write in complete sentences. You must think and be creative with your answers.
Now that you have learned a lot about the history of information technology, create a timeline that covers all of the key topics from 3000B.C. to the present. Make sure to seperate your timeline into the 4 different ages and include all of the technologies covered in the lesson AS WELL as other key technologies you research online. Your timeline can be in the form of a website, powerpoint, or anything you find to be creative.
QuestionsDirections: Answer each of the questions after reading the article above. Write in complete sentences. You must think and be creative with your answers.
Directions:
Answer each of the questions after reading the article above. Write in complete sentences. You must think and be creative with your answers.
- Why do so many people not know how the modern computer began?
- Why do you think the computer has changed more rapidly than the car?
- Name 3 ways people dealt with numbers and data in ancient times.
- Why was Blaise Pascal honored with a computer language named for him?
- What did Charles Babbage invent?
- How did the IBM company begin?
- What was so significant about the contest Herman Hollerith won?
- What was the dimensions of the Mark I verse the ENIAC?
- How do you think W.W.II might have been different if the ENIAC had not been invented then?
- Who came up with the idea of using "binary code" to store programs for computers?
- In each of the 4 generations what was the cause for the increase of speed, power, or memory?
- Why did the ENIAC and other computers like it give off so much heat? (Be very specific)
- What characteristics made the transistors better than the vacuum tube?
- How was space travel made possible through the invention of transistors?
- What did the microprocessor allow the computers to do? and What was the microprocessor's original purpose?
- When was the first computer offered to the public and what was its name?
- What was Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby known for?
- Intel was started by who?
- What is monolithic integrated circuits?
- How do you think society will be different if scientists are able to create a chip that will perform a trillion operations in a single second?
Take a look at the history of computer science timeline below. (from http://blog.connectionsacademy.com/discover-the-history-of-coding-for-computer-science-week/)
Computer Science Timeline
Computer Science Timeline
- 1843 – Mathematician Ada Lovelace writes about programming while she works with Charles Baggage, who creates the first plans for a mechanical computer. Lovelace writes an algorithm, or program, that could be used on this computer, which is why many consider her the first computer programmer.
- 1938 – Konrad Zuse completes the design and build of the Z1, the first freely programmable computer. It is a complex mechanical calculator that uses binary code, or “ones and zeros.”
- 1945 – John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert complete the Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzer and Computer (ENIAC), the first electronic computer. This makes it much faster than previous mechanical machines. Used by the U.S. Military to do ballistics calculations, the ENIAC weighs 30 tons and fills an entire 1,800 square foot room. Six women become the ENIAC’s main programmers: Jean Jennings Bartik, Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman.
- 1959 – COBOL, the first programming language to use words instead of numbers, is developed based on the work of Grace Hopper, a math professor and Navy rear admiral.
- 1963 – Douglas Engelbert invents the computer mouse. The device is nicknamed a “mouse” because it resembles the rodent, and the term seems to stick. At Stanford Research Institute, he helped to lay the foundation for the graphical user interface (GUI), which allows users to operate the computer visually on a screen using icons and a pointing device.
- 1969 – Computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider’s work greatly influences the development of the modern Internet. An Internet pioneer, he develops the ARPANET, the direct predecessor of the Internet, named after the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). He and his team exchange computer communications between universities.
- 1969 – Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna begin working on a multiuser operating system at AT&T’s Bell Labs. The system will become known as UNIX.
- 1970 – The programming language SQL, which stands for “Structured Query Language,” begins development at IBM.
- 1973 – The Xerox Alto is released, becoming one of the first personal computers for individual use. It is also the first computer with a desktop monitor and GUI. Before GUIs, computers were operated with only a keyboard. The Xerox Alto offered the capability to program in four different languages.
- 1973 – The fourth edition of UNIX is rewritten in C programming language. This allows the operating system to be moved to different computers, which will have a huge impact on the development of later systems.
- 1975 – Programmers Bill Gates and Paul Allen partner up to found a startup company called Microsoft. Their goal is to get “a computer on every desktop and in every home.”
- 1976 – Programmers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak found Apple Computer Company.
- 1977 – Apple Computer releases the first personal computer with color graphics, the Apple II.
- 1980 – Tim Paterson leads the development of 86-DOS (“Disk Operating System”), the first in a series of early operating systems, at Seattle Computer Products.
- 1981 – An early version of MS-DOS, Microsoft’s first computer operating system, is developed by Microsoft to run on IBM computers.
- 1981 – The IBM personal computer debuts, transforming the market with its affordable price and combination of personal and business capabilities.
- 1983 – The C++ programming language is developed by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup.
- 1983 – The first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, is released. It has a basic operating system that stores contacts, marking the beginning of mobile application development.
- 1984 – Apple releases its first Macintosh personal computer.
- 1985 – Microsoft releases its new operating system Windows 1.0, which can be operated using a mouse.
- 1989 – The World Wide Web (WWW) is created by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, a center for scientific research. It is intended to internationally share information between scientists. In the following year, Berners-Lee also establishes the web’s essential components: hypertext markup language (HTML) for creating web documents, the uniform resource locator (URL) for designating websites, and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) for sending and retrieving information on the web.
- 1991 – Dutch programmer Guido van Russum creates the Python programming language, which focuses on condensing and simplifying code.
- 1991 – Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer science student, releases Linux kernel. It evolves into Linux, a hugely popular operating system that is open source, which means it is free and can be customized by users.
- 1993 – CERN’s World Wide Web code is released to the public, allowing anyone to use and customize it. It quickly becomes a universal web service used on the Internet.
- 1995 – Java programming is created by James Gosling. It’s designed to run on most platforms.
- 1995 – Microsoft releases Windows 95. At the time of release, the majority of computers throughout the world run a Microsoft operating system.
- 1999 – At this point, most dates in code are formatted as “MM/DD/YY,” with the computer recognizing that there is a “19” before the year digits. As a result, everyone fears that computers will fail to shift from 1999 to 2000 and cause major problems. Billions of dollars are spent on fixing the code of the Y2K bug before the clock changes.
- 2000 – Danish software engineer Anders Hejlsberg develops C#, a simple general-purpose programming language.
- 2002 – Visual Basic .NET, a high-level programming language, is created by Microsoft.
- 2009 – The National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) is founded to protect institutions and infrastructures from malicious cyberthreats.
- 2013 – The nonprofit Code.org is launched to promote computer programming education in schools.
Specific Topics That Should Be Included
- Moore's Law
Useful Links / Sources
- http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/ and http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/topics
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing
- http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/
- http://www.computerhope.com/history/
- http://www.crews.org/curriculum/ex/compsci/articles/generations.htm
- http://www.crews.org/curriculum/ex/compsci/articles/history.htm
Further Reading of Interest
- http://computer.howstuffworks.com/computer-evolution.htm - How will computers evolve over the next 100 years?