History of ICT

Premechanical Age

The premechanical age is the earliest age of information technology. It can be defined as the time between 3000B.C. and 1450A.D. We are talking about a long time ago. When humans first started communicating they would try to use language or simple picture drawings known as petroglyths which were usually carved in rock. Early alphabets were developed such as the Phoenician alphabet.

Time which various systems were made that didn't need any mechanical effort, so it is called the pre-mechanical age of computers.

-Comminications:

Drawings 

Speaking

-Input tecnologies

Write their symbols in a kind of stone (like a wall) 

Papyrus (paper made of plants)

Paper rag

-Numeric Systems

Abacus first calculator

Petroglyph

lso during this period were the first numbering systems. Around 100A.D. was when the first 1-9 system was created by people from India. However, it wasn’t until 875A.D. (775 years later) that the number 0 was invented. And yes now that numbers were created, people wanted stuff to do with them so they created calculators. A calculator was the very first sign of an information processor. The popular model of that time was the abacus.

Abacus


Napier's bones was originally made by the Scottish mathematician John Napier in 1614. The tool consists of rectangular wooden rods, which are each marked with a number at the top, with the multiples of that number listed below down the rod. By aligning the rows, multiples of the top number of the rod can be read from right to left, by adding the digits of each parallelogram in the designated row. Through this mechanism, multiplication sums are transformed into addition sums.


Napier's bones

The mechanical era

Can be defined as the time between 1450 and 1840.

The idea of using machines to solve mathematical problems can be traced at least as far as the early 17th century. Mathematicians who designed and implemented calculators that were capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division included Wilhelm Schickhard, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibnitz.

The first multipurpose, i.e. programmable, computing device was probably Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, which was begun in 1823 but never completed. A more ambitious machine was the Analytical Engine. It was designed in 1842, but unfortunately it also was only partially completed by Babbage. Babbage. was truly a man ahead of his time: many historians think the major reason he was unable to complete these projects was the fact that the technology of the day was not reliable enough. In spite of never building a complete working machine, Babbage and his colleagues, most notably Ada, Countess of Lovelace, recognized several important programming techniques, including conditional branches, iterative loops and index.

 

The design describes a machine to calculate a series of values and print results automatically in a table.

Objective is to automatically compute mathematical tables

Addition was the only operation performed.

Difference engines are strictly calculators. 

They cannot be used for general arithmetical calculation.

They crunch numbers the only way they know how - by repeated addition according to the method of finite differences. 

However, using only addition, a large number of useful functions can be calculated by a technique called the method of finite differences.

Analytical Engine.

Analytical Engine

Pascaline, also called Arithmetic Machine,the first calculator or adding machine to be produced in any quantity and actually used. The Pascaline was designed and built by the French mathematician-philosopher Blaise Pascal between 1642 and 1644. It could only do addition and subtraction, with numbers being entered by manipulating its dials. Pascal invented the machine for his father, a tax collector, so it was the first business machine too (if one does not count the abacus). He built 50 of them over the next 10 years.

 Arithmetic Machine

Mark I was designed in 1937 by a Harvard graduate student, Howard H. Aiken to solve advanced mathematical physics problems encountered in his research. Aiken’s ambitious proposal envisioned the use of modified, commercially-available technologies coordinated by a central control system. Until 1945, “computer” was a job description for a person who performed mathematical operations for large-scale projects. The existence of new machines like Mark I created the need for a word to describe them. Around 1945, people started redefining such new machines as “computers.”



The Difference Engine

Electromechanical age

(1840-1940)

The discovery of ways to harness electricity was the key advance made during this perdios. Knowledge and information could now be converted into electrical impulses. The beginnings of telecommunication.

History of Telegraph
The telegraph created the character of our current information age. It broke the connection between communication and transportation. Prior to the telegraph, the speed of communication was the speed of a train--about 35 miles per hour! The telegraph dropped it to just a few seconds: point A to point B in an electronic pulse! With it a new experience was unfolding: information was no longer just local and rooted in immediate context. Instead, ideas and news were now presented in what Shane Hipps called in his book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture “a mosaic of unrelated data points with not apparent connection.”

Information ceased to be altruistic in nature. It became a hot and immediate commodity, something that could be bought or sold for profit. It began to whisper a new subliminal message that truth itself was in the words of Neil Postman “idiosyncratic” and that “history is irrelevant with no basis for valuing one thing over another.” Under this influence it didn’t take long for Neitzsche to adopt a nihilistic worldview and declare the death of God!

History of Radio Communication
Radio returned us to the tribal campfire where the spoken word and corporate experiences rule. Just as in tribal cultures, the radio allowed us to share songs, stories, news together at the same time, yet far beyond the warmth of a local campfire. Orson Welles’ famous 1938 radio broadcast of the story The War of the Worlds proved this point in a very real and frightening way. This was the first electronic implosion or reversal back to experiencing in some measure a prior form of media: the age of the orator. And although we remained a culture still largely dependent on literacy, radio created a hybrid consumer in that we could be described in radio’s heyday as a tribe of ones. Radio snapped us back to communal methods of learning that were experiential, oral, and corporate…rather than rational, visual, and private.

History of Photographic Communication
During the 19th century we witnessed an amazing convergence of three media technologies when the photography converged with the printing press and the telegraph, allowing images and icons to be produced on a mass scale and sent everywhere at once. In many ways the graphic revolution returned us to the iconic world of the Middle Age. Over time this iconic symbol system began to dissolve our dependence on literacy.

Electronic Age 

Some have begun to call it the Information Revolution. Technological changes brought dramatic new options to Americans living in the 1990s. From the beginning of the decade until the end, new forms of entertainment, commerce, research, work, and communication became commonplace in the United States. The driving force behind much of this change was an innovation popularly known as the Internet.

Personal computers had become widespread by the end of the 1980s. Also available was the ability to connect these computers over local or even national networks. Through a device called a modem, individual users could link their computer to a wealth of information using conventional phone lines. What lay beyond the individual computer was a vast domain of information known as cyberspace.

The INTERNET was developed during the 1970s by the Department of Defense. In the case of an attack, military advisers suggested the advantage of being able to operate one computer from another terminal. In the early days, the Internet was used mainly by scientists to communicate with other scientists. The Internet remained under government control until 1984.

One early problem faced by Internet users was speed. Phone lines could only transmit information at a limited rate. The development of FIBER-OPTIC cables allowed for billions of bits of information to be received every minute. Companies like Intel developed faster microprocessors, so personal computers could process the incoming signals at a more rapid rate.

New forms of communication were introduced. ELECTRONIC MAIL, or EMAIL, was a convenient way to send a message to associates or friends. Messages could be sent and received at the convenience of the individual. A letter that took several days to arrive could be read in minutes. Internet service providers like America Online and CompuServe set up electronic chat rooms. These were open areas of cyberspace where interested parties could join in a conversation with perfect strangers.

Mobile Phone

This history focuses on communication devices which connect wirelessly to the public switched telephone network. The transmission of speech by radio has a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony. The first mobile telephones were barely portable compared to today's compact hand-held devices. Along with the process of developing more portable technology, drastic changes have taken place in the networking of wireless communication and the prevalence of its use.

Televison

The invention of the television was the work of many individuals in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Individuals and corporations competed in various parts of the world to deliver a device that superseded previous technology. Many were compelled to capitalize on the invention and make profit, while some wanted to change the world through visual and audio communication technology.