Early Beginnings

The premechanical age is the earliest age of information technology. It can be defined as the time between 3000B.C. and 1450A.D. 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.

As alphabets became more popular and more people were writing information down, pens and paper began to be developed. It started off as just marks in wet clay, but later paper was created out of papyrus plant. The most popular kind of paper made was probably by the Chinese who made paper from rags.

Now that people were writing a lot of information down they needed ways to keep it all in permanent storage. This is where the first books and libraries are developed. You’ve probably heard of Egyptian scrolls which were popular ways of writing down information to save. Some groups of people were actually binding paper together into a book-like form.

The mechanical age can be defined as the time between 1450 and 1840. There were lots of different machines created during this era. Technologies like the slide rule were invented. Blaise Pascal invented the Pascaline which was a very popular mechanical computer. Charles Babbage developed the difference engine which tabulated polynomial equations using the method of finite differences.

The electromechanical age can be defined as the time between 1840 and 1940. These are the beginnings of telecommunication. The telegraph was created in the early 1800s. Morse code was created by Samuel Morse in 1835. The telephone (one of the most popular forms of communication ever) was created by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. The first radio developed by Guglielmo Marconi in 1894. All of these were extremely crucial emerging technologies that led to big advances in the information technology field.

 The electronic age is that we are currently living in. It can be defined as the time between 1940 and right now. The ENIAC was the first high-speed, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems. Also during this time high-level programming languages were created.

(ref: http://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/history/history.html )

Developmental Timeline

In 1939, both David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett Packard in a California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A audio oscillator, which becomes a popular piece of equipment for engineers. In 1940 for the movie ‘Fantasia’ Walt Disney ordered eight of the 200A model.

In 1943, this is when Project Whirlwind begins. The U.S navy contacts the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MTI) to build a flight stimulator to train bomber crews. The team built a large analogue computer. After designers saw a demonstration of the ENIAC computer, they decided on building a digital computer.

In 1948, IBM´s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator computed scientific data in public display near the company’s Manhattan headquarters. Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon-position tables used for plotting the course of the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon.

The first commercially produced computer was built by the Engineering Research Association in 1950, it was called the ERA 1101. The company’s first costumer was the US navy. The magnetic drum, the earliest metal storage devices, it held 1 million bits. The drums eventfully stored as many as 4’000 words and returned any one of them in as five-thousandths of a second. The drums registered information as magnetic pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder.

 In 1962, the MIT students wrote ‘spacewar!’ . This was considered as the first interactive computer game. The players fired spaceships at each other, they used early versions of joysticks to manipulate away from central gravitation force of a sun as well as from the enemy ship.

In 1971 the first email was sent. It was sent by Ray Tomlinson by accident. Tomlinson is credited on the one to decide on the ‘@’ sign.

In 1988, Robert Morris´ made the first computer virus, worm flooded the ARPANET.

The 23-year-old Morris, the son of a computer security expert for the National Security Agency, sent a non-destructive worm through the Internet, causing problems for about 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts linked to the network.

In 1990, the World Wide Web was born when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, developed Hypertext Mark-up Language.  HTML, as it is commonly known, allowed the Internet to expand into the World Wide Web, using specifications he developed such as URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol).

In 2004 Facebook was born. Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

An Inspirational Person – Mark Zuckerberg

Early life:

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated family. Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet." His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire.

There he showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the school's team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics. Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers, and continued to work on developing new programs. While still in high school, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse. Several companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager before graduation

College life:

After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University. It was at that time that he built a program called ‘CourseMatch’, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users. He also invented ‘Facemash’, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive.

Based on the buzz of his previous projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out to work on an idea for a social networking site they called Harvard Connection. Zuckerberg and his friends created a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. The group ran the site—first called The Facebook—out of a dorm room at Harvard until June 2004. After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to Facebook full time, moving the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users.

The Rise of Facebook:

Zuckerberg’s company then granted access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the site's membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005. The site then began attracting the interest of other companies, who wanted to advertise with the popular social hub. Not wanting to sell out, Zuckerberg turned down offers from companies such as Yahoo! and MTV Networks. Instead, he focused on expanding the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding more features.

(ref: http://www.biography.com/people/mark-zuckerberg-507402 )