Fantastic Day 2

Today we looked at the history of computers and the internet.

We started with Charles Babbage's difference engine which was designed to calculate and print mathematical tables. We then moved on to Turing's model designed to crack secret german codes during the 2nd World War. He then came up with the turing test (a human judge sits at a computer terminal and interacts with both a computer or a human by written communication only; if the judge cannot tell which is which then the machine has passed the test and is considered reasonable to call the computer intelligent!!) i liked this concept :)

The first computers were commercially produced in the 50's, these were basically glorified calculators - larger than computers today but a lot slower and less useful!! The first computer that looked like computers today (i think, i could be wrong on this point :) was the Apple II. However apples apparently were only for a 'niche' market of artisty people and was soon overtaken in popularity by IBM with Microsoft!! but not before making its founders very rich!!!

i found it interesting that the internet is not actually a 'thing', and that by using terms such as 'surfing the web' just helps to conceptialise this apparently abstract concept :) the world wide web was formally introduced in 93, but computer academics had been using the internet for a long time. i hadnt realised the internet and the world wide web were not the same thing!!

i must admit i found the movie about the internet, lans and firewalls very confusing!!! however i did like the movie about the internet call centre, i related as im sure ive produced the same amount of frustration for internet help desks in the past!!!!

I liked Marc Prensky's reading today, especially how he distinguishes between digital natives (younger people) and digital immigrants (older people). he pointed out that one reason young people like the internet is that social dividers dont exist on the web. He referred to blogs as a reversal of diaries for younger people and a 'intellectual sharing tool' for digital immigrants.

i found David Weinberger's article really easy to read, and really interesting. i liked how he told stories to make a point, personal experiences and stories he's heard from the news. i found the first story quite scary of the young guy who made an idle threat, and because of the times of fear that we live in he was locked up for 4 months!!! what ever happened to freedom of speech, it scares me where society might end up. . . . .