introduction to life in the information age

Life in the Information age has evolved exponentially in the last 20 years, and this was aided in the huge advances in technology in that time and all of the advances have helped progress our modern lifestyles to where they are today.

Communication

One of the most advanced and fasted changing forms Information sharing is communication. The telegram is what began this with people sending Morse code through a physical wire, this got more advanced as people could create codes which were very prominent in the world wars to send Information to an ally without it being intercepted and read.

After the invention of the Telephone communication could be done with physical audio instead of beeps and tones, however it wasn’t until much later in the 1970’s it would become much more popular as most people had one so it could be used effectively and with an actual useful function for being able to talk to anyone. The telephone continued to advance until the mobile telephone was invented, however this didn’t get much use from individuals because it was too big and too much of inconvenience to carry around. This changed as they started getting smaller and lighter while becoming readily available to most people so that anyone could start being reached from anywhere in the world.

The modern phone (or smartphone) has almost entirely taken over from all other phones. The piece of technology that was once for calls alone is gone and can now be used for millions of functions including text messaging and internet access. This huge advancement connected people like never before and people can communicate with any in the world from anywhere in the world.

 Advances in computing

The word “computer” simply means to add up or calculate, it was until the invention of the mechanical computer that being a computer was a job, (similar to accounting). After that huge computers were created for simple tasks like calculating, these were made with cables and transistors, these were run on 8_kb and then later upgraded to a 16_kb. Kb stands for kilobyte, this I what makes up the foundation for all computer and is made up of binary code (0’s and 1’s), a kilobyte contains 1024 bytes of data and each of those bytes hold 8 bits, each of those bits is either a 0 or a 1, the combinations of 0’s and 1’s creates the code for the computer so it knows what to do in a certain situation.

It was the found that binary code could be used for much more sophisticated uses and therefore perform millions if not billions of calculations. This is when the computer was made smaller and was to be used as a calculator. These were much larger machines than our current calculators weighing more than a person and were used in universities.

All of this advanced greatly when the computer chip was invented, this was when the circuits found in a larger computer could be mad much smaller by printing it onto small pieces of silicon. This is where computer started real advancements because they had found a very cheap and fast way to produce components for computers meaning more people could afford the machines they create. Computer chips are now able to be installed into almost anything; even cars now have a fairly powerful processor with up to 2 GB of RAM (Random access memory). The advancement that created the computer chip changed the use and availability of working computers for everyone and hugely brought forward the strength of the P.C to over a billion times as powerful with terabyte (1 billion kilobytes) sized hard drives and gigabytes (1 million kilobytes) of RAM.