Influential Technologies Plr Ebook

Ebook Table Of Contents

It Does Compute    3
Splitting the Atom    3
Journey Under the Sea    4
Seeing the Light    5
The Horseless Carriage    6
Electric Mobility Scooter    7
Greater Mobility    8
Read All About It    8
Snap a Picture    9
Taking Flight    10
Watching the Tube    11
Fast Cooking    12
Dangerous Allergies    13
Listen to the Music    13
Can You Hear Me Now    14
Fooling Mother Nature    15
Help for the Kidneys    16
Take a Deep Breath    16
Interchangeable Parts    17
Worlds Within Worlds    18
Staying Cool    19
The Home Solar Panel    20
Rocketing to the Future    21
Blank Day is Wash Day    22
Binding the World Together in a Web    22

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It Does Compute

Of all the modern devices, no other is perhaps a symbol of our high-tech age more than the computer. With the advent of high-speed computing chips, Gigs (billions of bits of data) of storage and memory, laptops and wireless internet connections, the world is literally wired together. Today, you can sit on a beach in New England and have a video conference with a client in Australia or chat with friends in the United Kingdom.

The earliest computing devices go back to ancient Greece, with the Antikythera mechanism; a machine that let people calculate the positions of stars and planets. It would be centuries before another such device came into existence. The Babbage Engine was a simple calculating machine for adding numbers, but it wasn’t until World War II that the Allies developed machines that could do massive calculations as part of the effort to crack the German Enigma coding machines. By the end of the decades, machines like ENIAC were doing simple arithmetic; these were massive computers, taking up entire buildings, using vacuum tubes, and requiring more power than some small towns.

It wasn’t until the integrated circuit was invented a decades later that computers began to shrink in size. As the circuits got smaller and more were packed onto a chip, the computers got more powerful. In the 80’s, the paper rollers used to type in data and get a response on were replaced with the first monitors – simple black and white screens. These were followed by the green screens, and the amber. Throughout the 80’s the technology improved by leaps and bounds. Where once the computer could only run programs off of floppy disks put in an external drive, and save and retrieve data the same way, an internal drive was developed, and then full-color monitors.