Тексти Information Technology

Н.Д. Карагяур

THE HISTORY OF THE PC.

In 1957, IBM made a computer called the 610 Auto-Point. They said that it was the first personal computer. But it was not a PC like the ones millions of people have in their homes today. It was large and expensive (55000 $). It was called a personal computer because it only needed one person to work it. The first real PCs were not made until 15 years later.

The first computer (like Colossus) did not have computer chips; they used glass tubes. That is why they were so big. But in the 1960s, technicians found a way to make chips with thousands of very small transistors on them. In 1971, Intel made a computer chip called the 4004. It had 2250 transistors. Three years later, they made the 8080, a better and faster chip with 5000 transistors. An American inventor called Ed Roberts used the Intel 8080 chip to make one of the first PCs. He called his PC the Altair 8800. (The name comes from the film Forbidden Planet.) When you bought an Altair 8800, you got a box of parts that you put together at home to make your PC. It cost less than 400$, and Ed Roberts sold 2000 in the first year. The personal computer was on its way.

In 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs started the Apple Computer Company. In 1977, their second computer, the Apple 2, appeared. It was popular, and the company made 700000 $ that year. The next year, the company made 7 million dollars! Even IBM knew that personal computers were here to stay. They made their first PC in 1981.

Since Intel made the 4004 chip in 1971 with 2250 transistors, computer chips have become much faster. In fact, the computer technician Gordon Moore made this prediction in 1965: the number of transistors on computer chips will double every eighteen months. This prediction is often called “Moore’s Law” and it seems to be true. The Intel Pentium 4 chip, made in the year 2000, has 42 million transistors!

Because today’s computer chips are so fast, modern PCs can do amazing things. They can put music onto CDs, and DVDs, and they can even understand spoken language. A modern PC is much faster than the very large and expensive computers from the 1970s.

BILL GATES AND MICROSOFT.

PCs are a very important part of life today, but in the 1970s most people did not know very much about them. One of the first people to see the future of the PC was Bill Gates; because of this, he is now one of the richest people in the world.

Bill Gates was born in Seattle, USA, in 1995. He began to study computer programming at school, when he was thirteen. Later, he went to Harvard University. While he was a student there, he and a friend, Paul Allen, wrote a computer program for a new personal computer, the Altair 8800. They showed it to Ed Roberts, the man who had invented the Altair 8800. Ed Roberts liked the software and agreed to use it. Gates and Allen left university early and started their own company – Microsoft.

Microsoft’s first big success came in 1981. Apple computers were already very popular, and so the computer company IBM decided to start building PCs. They asked Bill Gates to write an Operating System for their PCs, and he wrote MS-DOS. It was not very easy to use, but it was still a big success.

In 1984, Apple made a new computer called a Macintosh. Bill Gates and Microsoft helped to write the Operating System for this computer. It was much easier to use than MS-DOS because it had pictures on the screen instead of difficult instructions. Later, Microsoft made their own Operating System which used pictures – they called it Windows. Windows became the most successful piece of software in the history of computing. By 1986, Bill Gates was already a billionaire at the age of thirty one.

In the 1990s, Microsoft became even larger. In 1995, the new Operating System (Windows 95) came with a piece of software that let people use the Internet. Soon, millions of people were paying Microsoft 20$ a month to use the Internet.

Many people are unhappy about Microsoft because they think the company is too big and powerful. Most personal computers use the Windows Operating System, so people usually buy Microsoft software too. It is difficult for small software companies to show their programs to the public.

Recently the Internet has given people a chance to find out about other kinds of software. Some programmers do not want money for their software – they just want to share ideas with other computers programmers. They called this kind of software “shareware”. However a lot of people are happy to pay money for the software which they use at home and in the office, so the future of Microsoft and other software companies is probably safe.

THE INTERNET.

The Internet began in the 1970s as a way to send the information from one computer to another. It was only used by people who worked in governments and universities. But in the 1990s, it suddenly began to be more popular.

In the early 1990s, a British man called Tim Berners-Lee invented the “Web”. With the Web it was much easier to find information on the Internet, and to move from one part of the Internet to another. By the end of the 1990s, millions of people around the world were using the Web for many different things: for example, working, shopping, playing games and studying.

In the first half of the 1990s, it was clear that the Internet and the Web were changing the world for ever. Hundreds of new companies started on the Internet. They knew that the Internet was growing, and that it offered an easy way to do business with millions of people. The banks were very happy to give money to these new “Internet startup” companies because they seemed to be the future. However, by the end of the 1990s there were too many of these companies. They could not all be successful, and many of them went out of business. Now, only the best of the Internet start-up companies are making money.

Young people often know more about computing and the Internet then older people. For this reason some very young people have had a lot of success with Internet start-up companies. Tom Hadfield began using computers at the age of two. When he was 12, he began putting football scores on the Internet just because he liked football. This soon became a business called Soccernet. During the 1998 World Cup 300000 people visited the Soccernet website every day. In 1999 Tom and his father sold 60 per cent of Soccernet to Disney for 15 million pounds. Tom and his father also started another Internet company called Schoolsnet which has information for students and teachers. Thanks to the Internet Tom Hadfield became a very successful businessman before he left school.

Today, almost every company in the world has got a website on the Internet. Each site has got a special name (a web address) and you use this to visit the site. In the early 1990s, before most companies had really thought about the Internet, some people got web address with the names of famous companies – for example, Panasonic and Hertz.  These people were not part of the companies; they were hoping to sell the web addresses to the companies for a lot of money one day in the future. This was called “cybersquatting”. Since 1999, new international laws yave made cybersquatting impossible.

Internet users can be anywhere in the world; they just need a computer and a telephone. For this reason, it is often difficult to control what happens on the Internet. In January 1999, an American University student called Shawn Fanning invented a piece of software that could copy music. In May of the same year, he started a company called Napster. Internet users could visit Napster and copy their favorite music. Suddenly, they did not need to buy CDs. Of course, the music companies were not very happy about this. A lot of musicians were also unhappy, because people could get their music free. In the end, Napster agreed to pay money to the music companies and musicians.

The Internet is not only important for business. It is also a cheap way to make contact with people from all over the world. A lot of people visit “chat rooms”: in a chat room, you can “talk” to other Internet users and read their answers on your computer immediately. There is even a special kind of language which people use to safe time. For example, they write “HAND” to mean “Have a Nice Day”; or they write ‘LOL’ (laughing out loud) when they find something funny. There are also special ways to show feelings: for example,  means I’m happy, and  means I’m sad.

As computers become more powerful, the Internet becomes easier to use. Some people now do most of their shopping at websites. But there are still a lot of people who like to go into town and visit real shops. They want to look before they buy – and they prefer to talk to a person than to a computer.

GETTING THE MESSAGE.

Although the first email message was sent in 1971, electronic messages began nearly two hundred years earlier. Telegraphs machines used electricity to send messages along wires from one place to another. The first telegraph machine was built in 1774. But for the next sixty years, the machines were very large and difficult to use, and each one needed twenty-six wires – one for each letters of the alphabet. In the 1840s, an American inventor called Samuel Morse built a better kind of telegraph which only one wire. He also invented a special code for messages – Morse Code. Immediately, telegraphs became an important way for people to communicate. During the next twelve years, American telegraph companies put up 36000 miles of telegraph wires to send messages all over the USA.

In the 1920s, a new kind of electronic message was invented – the telex. A telex machine could send a message to any other telex machine in the world. They did not use telephone or telegraph wires – they used telex lines. These lines were quite expensive, and the machines were not easy to use. Companies continued to use telex until the 1980s and many companies still have telex machines today.

In the 1980s, people began to buy personal computers. Soon, it was possible to send email messages from one PC to another, but both people had to be part of the same email system. There were several different email systems, and it was not possible to send messages from one system to another. For this reason, emails did not immediately become popular.

In the 1990s, people began to use the Internet and the Web. This made it easier to send email messages because there was only one system. Emails soon became a very popular (and very cheap) way to send messages to anywhere in the world. In the late 1990s, people started to send another kind of electronic message. Now they could send or receive messages in any place and at any time.

Text messages use their own kind of language. Long text messages are not easy to send or read, so people find ways to make them shorter. For example, when you write a message in English, you can write ‘RUOK?’ (are you ok?), or ‘B4’ (before). This way, you can send invitations in just a few letters and numbers: for example, ‘CUL8R4T’ (See you later for tea.)

COMPUTERS GAMES.

In the early 1960s, the computer company DEC made a computer called a PDP-1. PDP-1s were large and expensive (120000 $), so only companies and universities bought them. Steve Russell, a student at one of these universities wrote a piece of software for the PDP-1. It was a game for two players, and he called it Spacewar. The two players controlled spaceships which fought against each other. Users of the PDP-1 liked the game, and other programmers made the software better.

In the late 1960s, a programmer called Donald Woods invented a game Adventure. This was a different kind of game from Spacewar because it did not have any pictures and it was for one player only. The computer told a story; the player took part in the story, and gave the computer instructions, like ‘Go south,’ or ‘Get the box’.

Together, Spacewar and Adventure started the two most important kinds of computer games: games with speed and actions, and games with stories and imagination. But it was a few years before computers games became popular. In 1971, a student called Nolan Bushnell tried to make money from the game Spacewar. People didn’t have PCs then, so he built a machine for bars, shopping centers, and others places where people meet. To play the game, people had to put money in the machine. A company bought Nolan Bushnell’s idea for 500 dollars and made 1500 machines. But nobody wanted to play the game.

Nolan Bushnell decided that the space game was too difficult. He used his 500 $ to start his own company, Atari, and invented a much easier game. It was a tennis game called Pong, and it was very easy to play. People loved it! In 1976, Bushnell sold Atari for 28 million dollars. Computer games were here to stay.

Since the 1980s, computers games have changed a lot. Computers are much more powerful, so the games are much faster and use amazing pictures. How much better can games become? If you have seen Star Trek: The Next Generation on television, perhaps you have seen the virtual reality room on the on spaceship. People can take part in amazing stories which look and feel the same as reality. This kind of game is still in the future, but perhaps not very far in the future.

“I LOVE YOU” (AND OTHER VIRUSES).

A virus is a kind of computer program. It moves from one computer to another and damages the memory or other parts of the computer. Some viruses are difficult to stop; they can damage millions of computers in a very short time.

The first virus appeared in 1986. It was called Brain. In 1987, a more dangerous virus called Jerusalem appeared. This virus stayed in a computer and did nothing until the date was Friday 13^th; the it started to damage the computer’s memory. People knew that viruses were going to be a problem, and programmers began to write anti-virus software needed to get better and better. By 1988, newspapers and magazines were beginning to have stories about viruses.

By the early 1990s, there were more than 150 computer viruses in the world. Some of these viruses were more ‘intelligent’ than others:  they had special software which made it very difficult for people to fight the virus. One programmer wrote a few different viruses around this time. This person is known as Dark Avenger, and he (or she) probably lives in Bulgaria, but the police have never found him. In 1993, the SatanBug virus appeared in Washington DC. The anti-virus software companies worked with the police to find the programmer, who was just a child.

By the late 1990s, most computers were part of the email and Internet systems. This meant that virus programmers could do a lot of damage very quickly. For example, in 1999, the Melissa virus appeared. It could move from one computer to another by email. A year later, the most successful virus in history reached millions of computers in less than 24 hours. When it appeared on a computer, it automatically sent itself to every other address in the computer. This virus was called ‘I love you’. The virus programmers are getting better all the time, but so is the anti-virus software. Some people think that viruses will do a lot more damage in the future. Computers are now an important part of everything; without them, the modern world will stop. Nobody will be able to travel, work, shop, watch television, get money, or send messages. Perhaps one day, a computer virus will bring the world to a stop for a few hours.