A Brief History on Computer Science | PART TWO: Attack of the Phones... internet service providers.
Stopping for a breath of air feels nice, doesn’t it? Too bad, harden up and learn (review?) something…
FORTRAN comes into play in 1957, and IBM is dominating the market, followed shortly by COBOL… and then after a blatant run on, in ’62 we see Stanford and Purdue establish some stuff. Departments…that ‘do stuff.’ What stuff? Computer Science!
The end. Okay then there’s this thing called the Internet. That’s relevant right? ARPANET came about in ’69, while Cray computers push the bar on processing speeds. Intel kicks in with small microprocessors; FTP is established; Alan Kay says hello from Stanford with his mouse and graphics (icons and more); Jobs and Wozniak build their Apple while Gates and Allen start Microsoft in 77. This brings us to modern day computing. 1977! No not because Microsoft had a party, rather, because I was born and ready to surf the web… which… okay never mind.
Sooo… in The eighties, we saw the PC’s come to be, Apple and IBM, as well as many computerized consoles, appliances, and later on laptops and smart devices. CD-ROMs became a great alternative to magnet-sensitive, and small file space diskettes. By the mid nineties, Programming became increasingly accessible and user-friendly. With dial-up internet, file sharing, and MUDS/MOOs, BBS’, and operating systems enabling accessibility and communication in an exponentially growing capacity.
I remember 800 baud modems. Logging in to Genie, Compuserve, or *cough* AOL. Everyone had much more patience then… or dealt with it as there was little alternative. Play by mail Dungeons and Dragons was still a thing. Well, it still is, but much less popular (the play by mail thing, not the game.)
I suppose I’ll leave this as a history lesson and not so much a current day lesson as I long-wind like some old man to his family on a cold night… We have science and computers, and computer science. We have fourth generation microprocessors with 32 and 64 bit operating systems running at many thousands of operations per second in tandem. It’s often healthy to take a step back and get some perspective on just how far we have come, in order to understand that we can always innovate. There is always more to learn, and in order to do that we study, experiment, and communicate. We are passionate, sleep deprived, perceptive, adaptive, and bright, Computer Scientists.
I cannot morally complete this post without mentioning some major things such as UNIX/Linux, C, ParcPlace and Java. I have some links to do some digging on these as they require appropriately long posts to discuss:
I love the title. Great overview of the history / progression of computers. Very good use of visuals and links to help me further pursue your finds. It is truly amazing how far we have come like you said, computers are advancing at a tremendous speed.
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