Final Project

Here is the link for my Final Project:

http://jontree255.wix.com/hist-390-project

Here is the Commentary for my Site:

Computers have literally changed every aspect of our lives and the world around us. 40 years ago computers were literally the size of several rooms and could only make minor calculations. These days nearly all of us carry a computer around in our pockets that have us constantly linked to each other and the rest of the world. Without these machines human existence as we know it would be completely different either for better or for worse.

Modern computers have their roots much father back than the 20th century but for the purposes of this project we will primarily examine the modern computer. Modern computers had their beginnings in military and college labs in the mid 1950s for helping with very complex math equations. At around the same time the beginnings of the what would become the internet were taking formation as these early computers were physically connected to each other to share information between them. The first networked computers that resemble a modern day LAN were invented in the mid 60s while at the same time computer scientists were describing a future in which all the computers in the world would be connected together to share information. Shortly after this the first home calculating “desktop” computers were introduced in the late 1960s. These computers were much larger than desks and it wasn’t until the 1970s that they were true desktop computers.

Computers were starting to interest more and more people by the late 1970s with many groups in California forming computer hobby clubs to share knowledge about computers and build their own custom designs. These clubs were the origins of the hacker culture, where information was not restricted and people looked for backdoor ways to accomplish any task. In one of these groups was Steve Wozniak, who along with his friend Steve Jobs built and marketed their own circuit board for use in a home computer labeled the Apple I in 1976. The late seventies was the period where the average person could buy a computer for their home rather than going to a university or a lab to use one. The Apple I was not a very successful computer but the Commodore PET was the first successful desktop computer and foreshadowed what was to come in the 80s.

The early 1980s is where home computing really took off. With the release of the Macintosh, the TCP/IP protocol for the internet formalized, and Windows 1 released computers were invading the homes of people everywhere. They were beginning to change the way we do things. In the 1980s it was mostly word processing, spreadsheets, and the occasional video game but it was becoming clear that these machines were changing things. While hardware was steadily getting better it was going to take more than faster processors to radically change human existence.

In December of 1990 the World Wide Web was launched at the particle physics lab CERN in Switzerland. Computers could now link to each other from any distance to share information and view webpages. People could now communicate like never before through blog posts and emails. People could also share files, including ones protected by copyright. The debate surrounding the website Napster opened up many questions about the use of the web and still sparks some debate today. The biggest question being should we limit the internet to protect intellectual property rights? The web grew so large and so quickly that sites were developed just to narrow the field of the web and focus on what you were looking for. At fist these search engines were very picky and you had to bend them to you will but with the creation of Google the web became much more easy for people to access and find the things that they need. This was just another step in making computers and the internet more accessible for the world.

The 21st century has truly connected nearly every corner of the world. Smart phones are constantly connected to the internet and can notify us of many happenings in our lives and the lives of others. The iPad has signaled the end of the personal computer and the dawn of the tablet era. Computers have made us much more aware of the world around us and much more capable to accomplishing tasks that were unheard of only a few decades ago. One can look back and think; What would a person from the 1950s say about an iPhone? They might actually call it magic, or think it was something out of a sci-fi novel.

Preserving this website should not prove to be difficult. If there is any lesson that the digital age has shown us it is that it is incredibly hard to loose or forget information on the web. The nature of the web itself preserves this site, even if it is buried under countless other sites it will always be available through its URL. Since there is no central server for the web the internet will never crash. In the event that Wix will no longer host the site then it would be necessary to copy the HTML code for the site to a computer and then back that HTML file up to a hard drive.



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