If we were to credit the incredible and fascinating development of technology in the past decades, we should definitely be commemorating only a selected few. In the past generation we have been introduced to newer electronic device each and every year, and both authors of "Computers" educate us on how the major technology corporations have established a new virtual world within the second half of the life story of technology. Personally, I enjoyed this half of the book as a good part of the content primarily focused on how major corporations today like Apple, Google and Yahoo! started their dominance of the technological world.
As Swedin and Ferro continue to write about every possible technological invention that has contributed to computers, many of these inventions are now expanded on or still lasts today. For example, the Apple II which cost "$790 with 4 kilobytes of RAM" has now been developed into iMac's that have up to 27-inch screens with 4 Gigabytes of RAM. Moreover, operating systems have evolved superbly. As seen with Microsoft, who provided IBM PC's with their Windows operating system starting in the early 1980s (as early as Windows 3.0), we now have Windows 7, and XP, in which most businesses and corporations use to run their operations. Another example of an expanded or developed technology is Gopher. Gopher, founded in 1980s aimed at "finding information content on the Internet easier...by creating a massive online library" (p. 124). Sounds familiar right? Jerry Yang (Yahoo!) and Larry Page (Google) made "the web search engine business extremely competitive in the late 1900s" (p. 129) as they both created their well profited businesses, Yahoo! and Google.
Presently, there are numerous of technology companies out in the very demanding technology market, but only a couple are the dominant ones. It's obvious that those dominating companies are Apple and Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! and all of their stories to becoming powerhouses today is what made this reading exciting. The founders of all these corporations have one thing in common: they started small, and grew like a beanstalk as they all had the highest ambitions. Paul Allen and Bill Gates (Micro-Soft) were "enterprising teenagers both worked as programmers for several companies...just for the fun of it" (p. 88). Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs (Apple) both showed their impressive abilities to build homemade computers during high school, and worked in well respected companies like Hewlett Packard. In depth, Swedin and Ferro reiterate that the smaller technologies were essential to building what we have now. Companies like Compaq, Dell, Gateway; several different operating systems like Linux, Lotus and Windows; and programs like WordPerfect and Wordstar are all essential developments for our current technological world today.
After all the talk about the fierce competition that still lasts today between Apple, IBM (they have been a quiet company in the past 6 years), and Microsoft, Swedin and Ferro briefly introduce the developments of the Telephone that was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1844 that continues to be a prime source of communication today; wireless networking, that was started by Norman Abramson in 1970 started in Hawaii; and the "social standard of net etiquette" (p. 123) founded by Usenet became the start of social networking, now that we constantly are using IM language such as LOL, BRB, G2G, smiley faces, etc.
All in all, the authors of "Computers" conclude the book questioning the future of technology as we have read a long 149 pages of early technologies. Computers specifically has "accelerated the pace of technological change, so much so that some pundits predict a singularity in the near future when computers completely transform humanity's ability to manipulate reality" (p. 149) and we have now become a world stuck in a virtual world. Everything we do each day involves technology and traditional products have become obsolete. As a college student, still young and somewhat tech savvy, I am excited to see what technologies continue to make up this virtual world.
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