Week 6

This week provided a detailed history on computers and computing. Important dates and accomplishments to note are as follows

• The first attempt at a computer was created by Charles Babbage named the 'Difference Engine." This was designed to calculate and print mathematical tables. Unfortunately this was not completed in his lifetime. He later created the "Analytical Engine" which was a massive, brass, steam-powered, general purpose, mechanical computer.
• Babbage was aided by Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace. She annotated her own translation of an Italian article about Babbage, named Sketch of the Analytical Engine.
• Work on the computer was later carried out by Alan Turing who invented the first working computer, The Bombe.
• Computers were first commercially produced by IBM in the 1950s
• Xerox PARC developed the mouse and GUI in the early 70s
• The first personal computer was released in 1975
• Bill Gates wrote a language called BASIC for the Altair
• Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple
• IBM and Microsoft joined to take over the computing industry
• Linus Torvalds created GNU/Linux (Open Source software development)
• The internet, is a network of networks (what is often called an internetwork).
• The idea of the internet came from the RAND corporation in the 1960s
• The World Wide Web or Web for short, is one particular use of the Internet that emerged in the 1990s. The Web merges the techniques of (i) internetworking and (ii) hypertext to make an easy-to-use, but powerful, global system that shares all information accessible as part of a seamless hypertext space.
• Cyberspace is a much more difficult term to define, sitting as it does at the interconnction of reality and imagination, the hardware and the software, logic assembly of silicon and electricity on the desk and the wetware between your ears.
• In 1972 Karl Popper wrote about the nature of reality as being divided into three worlds:
  World 1 - the objective material world of natural things and their physical properties
  World 2 - subjective consciousness: intentions, calculations, feelings, thoughts, dreams, memories, etc in individual minds
  World 3 - the public structures produced by living minds interacting with each other and the real world.
• Early Internet Applications include: Email, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), MUDs - Multy User Domain games.

There was no Tute due to Anzac day.