Computer History And Methodology By Mansur Boydaş Mensur Boydas

1. HISTORY OF WHAT     (Fraunfelder)

Five concepts in Fraunfelder:

PONG

In today's world video games are an essential part of millions' life and it has a bigger market than films. Bushnell who is an electrical engineer student had several attempts to create games but they were not successful. Then he made a game called "Pong that that is a ping-pong simulator that required nothing more of the player than to twiddle a knob to move an onscreen paddle and hit a ball (Fraudliner, Mark, 2006). The game Pong was the world's first video game in the early 70's. This is a modern version of the game. The first screen is where you select how you want to play by moving the joystick: UP and DOWN to select Human vs. Human, Human vs. Computer or Computer vs. Computer. The computer vs. computer game to plays forever or until someone reset the game using the reset switch. You start serving by pressing fire; it is also likely to change direction and speed of the ball using fire. The player who has the serve will get points. If the player with the serve misses the ball, then the serve goes over to the other player. The paddles are moved up and down with the joysticks. It is possible to smash (increase speed) by pressing FIRE, and when doing so it is also possible to guide the ball by moving joystick up or down. When someone wins a game over picture will show and tell who won. Bushnell started a business called Atari and started selling Pong to arcades and bars. He had more luck this time and people love the game. Then in 1974 Atari made a home version of Atari but did not have the money to keep up with their competitors, afterwards Warner Communications bought the company. It is this game that triggered the video games history and personal computers that people wanted to play the game in their computers at home.

Figure 2: Pong in a different set up

NINTENDO GAMEBOY

Nintendo Game Boy is a system of a compact game developed and manufactured by Gumpei Yokoi who works for the company and it is released in 1989. "It is the bestselling video game player ever and 168 million units have been sold since it was introduced (Fraudliner, Mark, 2006). This was another hit in the history of computing and video game industry. People were buying it to play a game called Tetris that is written by Russian Alexey Pazhitnov. Computers were invented in the early 70's and by the invention of video games computers became more popular because people wanted to play the games at their home without any distraction like workspace. The Nintendo Game Boy had a lot of contribution to the history of video games as it pushed its competitors to invent a more advanced, cooler console, video games and etc. to attract the peoples' attention to keep themselves in the business. Then in the following years Nintendo advanced its gaming consoles.

WORLD WIDE WEB

The World Wide Web has transformed the computer and communications world like nothing else before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unique combination of qualifications. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information broadcasting, and a medium for cooperation and interface between individuals and their computers without consideration of geographic distance.

These people are the ones who contributed in the development of World Wide Web.

• 1945: Vannevar Bush

• 1960: J.C.R Licklider

"Man Computer Symbiosis" (Pre-W3C, 2006).

• 1962: Douglas Englebart

• 1965: Ted Nelson

"Ted Nelson coins the term "Hypertext" in "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate". 20th National Conference, New York, Association for Computing Machinery" (Pre-W3C, 2006).

• 1968: Douglas Englebart

• 1969: ARPANET

"Advanced Research Projects Agency commissions ARPANET to conduct research on networking. First ARPANET nodes connected" (Pre-W3C, 2006).

• 1971: Ray Tomlinson

"Ray Tomlinson of BBN creates email program to send messages across a distributed network. 1972: Tomlinson expands program to ARPANET users, using the "@" sign as part of the address" (Pre-W3C, 2006).

• 1974: Vint Cerf / Bob Kahn

"Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection", which specified in detail the design of a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)" (Pre-W3C, 2006).

• 1978: TCP/IP

"Part of TCP splits off, becoming the Internet Protocol (IP)" (Pre-W3C, 2006).

As you can see it was a quite history to be able to come up with the extraordinary invention of all time that is a part of millions of people around the world. With the invention of the internet users of the computer tremendously increased as it is convenient in a lot of ways and are increasing still. It became the main part of computer, now a computer without the internet is just a machine that computes and functions as a gaming console and a type-writer. It is quite interesting to watch as the history unleashes its chambers to present. All of the parts developing and combining, emerging to create the computer as it happens in Transformers.

GOOGLE

The search engine started as a research project by a Phd student student at Stanford in January 1996. " Today more than 100 million people ask Google, the number one search engine on the world" (Fraudliner, Mark, 2006). Google became the reference of the world to anything from a to z from billions of Web pages in just a matter of seconds. Despite the fact that it's free, it made a fortune for its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. "The company makes money by advertising and by licensing its search technology to corporations" (Fraudliner, Mark, 2006). The Google search engine attracted the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.  Google has begun selling ads related with keyword searhes. The advertisements were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Google has a lot of features and some of them are earth, video, scholars, groups, g-mail, image search and many more. Google is really the main search engine that assists millions of people around the world every day. It is really interesting to exposure the discourse develops as the picture of technology painted part by part. All of these are a part of computer that is enabling games, videos, connectivity and many other things for the society of earth. Google will become more important as the World Wide Web gets developed. The history showed that the future will be bright as technology develops.

1. WHO AND WHERE: ACADEMIA (Markoff)

Doug Engelbert:

He is generally known as the inventor of computer mouse teamed with Bill English. His group and he accomplished many technological establishments and some of them are hypertext, human computer interaction, networked computers and precursors to GUIs.

The figure shows that the very first computer mouse engineered by Engelbert showing the wheels that directly contacts the working surface. According to the historian of Science Therry Bardini believed that Engelbart's complex personal philosophy that drove all his research endeavors shoved the modern application of the concept  to the philosophy and use of tech. The historian also says that Engelbart was strongly influenced by the principle of linguistic relativity developed by Benjamin Lee Whorf. "Where Whorf reasoned that the sophistication of a language controls the sophistication of the thoughts that can be expressed by a speaker of that language, Engelbart reasoned that the state of our current technology controls our ability to manipulate information, and that fact in turn will control our ability to develop new, improved technologies" (Wikipedia). He was an uncontrollable and different from his group of people. He was dealing with SRI projects. Markoff says that Engelbart and Rosen who is another engineer in the group had met when Engelbart was hired at SRI, and of course he had immediately told Rosen about his dream for building Bush's Menex information search and retrieval machine.  Rosen was impressed, but he had not thought much about it since. Thereafter the researches took a high road and one day Engelbart wrote some thoughts on a paper and Rosen took it to Pentagon and the man from Pentagon wanted to see him. He was granted the first research by $25,000. Then he made much advancement in the digital technology such as the computer mouse. He visualized and developed many of his user interface ideas back in the mid 60s, long before the personal computer revolution, at a time when people were kept away from computers, and could only use computers through UN armed forces and when software tended to be written for vertical applications in proprietary systems.

Engelbart later revealed that it was nicknamed the "mouse" because the tail came out the end. In an interview with SRI patented the mouse then for the value of $40,000 Apple had licensed the product.

Engelbart is a great contributor in technology of computer and digital world. Markoff says that when was still largely about data processing; Engelbart had put together almost all of the critical components of modern personal computing; hypertext, graphics, multiple windows, efficient navigation and command input, collaborative work, and a mouse pointing device. The list here was collaborated nearly 40 years ago, symbolizes the computer we are using right now. This is pretty interesting journey.

John Mc Carthy:

He is now a Professor Emeritus. John McCarthy's influence in computer science ranges from the invention of LISP and time-sharing to the coining of the term AI and the founding of the AI laboratory at Stanford University. One of the foremost figures in computer sciences, McCarthy has written papers which are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide range of topics. In this collection of reviews, McCarthy staunchly defends the importance of Artificial Intelligence research against its attackers; this book gathers McCarthy's reviews of books which discuss and criticize the future of AI. Here, McCarthy explores the larger questions associated with AI, such as the question of the nature of intelligence, of the acquisition and application of knowledge, and the question of the politics behind this research. He is the founder of AI which led to many achievements in the significant technological advancements.

1. WHO AND WHERE: THE COUNTERCULTURE (Turner)

Stewart brand:

The Catalog hunted to "catalyze the emergence of a realm of personal power" by making soft technology available to people eager to create sustainable communities. Brand went on to found a number of do-good organizations, including the WELL or Whole Earth Electronic Link (an early online community); the Global Business Network (a futurist consulting firm); and the Long Now Foundation (dedicated to encouraging long-term thinking). He is the author of several books and many articles, ranging in focus from the psychedelic rituals of Native Americans to a systems analysis of "buildings in time." Today, he and his wife live on a tugboat in Sausalito, CA. Turner notes that for Ehrlich and Holm, and the young Stewart Brand, cultural activities such as politics, art, conversation, and play took on a deep significance for the survival of the species. When humans threatened to destroy themselves with Nuclear weapons, concrete expressions of culture offered a way to help them to move forward and escape total destruction. They played a big role in keeping the world as a safe place and I call them peace keepers. Turner also notes that his search for individual liberty guided to a decade- long migration among a wide variety of bohemian, scientific and academic communities.

"When his Whole Earth Catalog became a forum in which such communities met, Brand began to see how the systems orientation of Paul Ehrlich's population biology, combined with new, countercultural models of living, might offer an appealing individualistic lifestyle, not only for him, but also for anyone else who could abandon the halls of bureaucratic America.   Stewart Brand is here with Army-length hair in 1961.

Figure: Hacker

The central theme of the book is that several fields of contemporary science and philosophy point in the same direction: intelligence is not organized in a centralized structure but much more like a bee-hive of small simple components. Kelly applies this view to bureaucratic organizations, intelligent computers, and to the human brain."Kevin outlines eight "generative": authenticity, accessibility, immediacy, interpretation, personalization, patronage, embodiment, findability. (I've reordered them as I find "aaiippef" makes it a bit easier to remember them all.) He defines a "generative" as "a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, and nurtured. It cannot be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced" (George, 2005). This list is an excellent starting point for economic models in the digital world. These eight things cannot be copied. These are the things that people will be willing to pay for. These are the things that can be made to be more valuable through leveraging the abundance of imitable goods. Kevin notes that "more importantly, I think, the types of economic models derived from this thinking allow us to take advantage of the abundance of digital information rather than fearing it. This sort of thinking allows us to view digital technology as a blessing rather than a curse". Nowadays, he is Chairman of the Board of  a non-profit organization aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth. His contribution to technology called the third culture. Back then the advancements in the Science was disregarded, but the culture was knows as music, literature and etc. Even though the developments help to strengthen the culture it was regarded and was not cool at all. Then the third culture appeared. Kevin's new third culture is a brood of science. It's a pop culture based in technology, for the good of technology. In the last two decades, as technology hyper flooded our cultural environment, the gravity of technology simply became too hard to disregard. For this current generation of Nintendo kids, their technology is their culture. When they reached the point of creating the current trends, the next witty thing happened Scientists became cool.

Mansur Boydaş