Objectives: After studying the Module 2 Project Chip, you will be able to:

1. Discuss some of the changes that have taken place in computers over the last 20 years.

YOUR LESSON

Introduction

In the History assignments from Module 1 and 2, you have begun to learn something about the contributions of various computer pioneers to the development of the wide range of computing devices that are commonly available today.

If you are a high school student, you were not even born when the first "personal" computers were invented way back in the late 1970s and early 1980s! Many of the adults you know (parents, relatives, teachers, neighbors, employers, friends, etc.) probably remember when microcomputers first became available to the general public for business and home use. Some of these folks even learned to program on mainframe computers well before that.

So, you don't have to research computer pioneers to learn about computer history, there are people all around you who have some valuable firsthand experience with the history of the personal computer because they were there when it was invented!

The following is a brief recollection of a virtual online instructor that may give you a sense of how it was back in the day.

"The first time I saw a computer was June, 1970. I had a summer job collecting marine specimens for an Oceanography professor at the Florida State University Marine Lab about 60 miles from Tallahassee. He had an analog computer that looked like a peg board (about 3 feet square) on a stand with flashing lights, mechanical switches, and wires going all over the place. By flipping the switches in specific sequences and moving the wires around, the computer could be programmed to calculate simple statistics. Back then, there was no keyboard, monitor, mouse, or printer. The output of the program had to be decoded by interpreting the lights on the front panel. It was more of a curiosity which seldom seemed to work correctly and really didn't interest me much at the time.

In January, 1972, I took a course in FORTRAN at FSU. The computer was housed in a converted classroom in the basement of the Mathematics building and took up almost the entire room. It was very cold because the computer generated so much heat that the air conditioner was on all the time. In a separate room, card punch machines were stationed in rows. You sat at one and typed your program on a keyboard and the code was transferred to cards (roughly 3 inches wide by 8 inches long) by a noisy mechanical device that punched out holes in the card. Because the computer was expensive to operate, it was important for programs to be correct before they were run. Flowcharting was used to design algorithms and then to step through the logic of the code in order to catch errors before submitting the deck of cards to be run. When you were confident that your program would run, you gave your deck of cards to the computer operator. The operator put the punched cards in a reader. Each card was read individually by a light beam that "read" the program code based on the light that passed through the cards. If you were lucky, the operator would give you back your cards and a printout with the correct output. Needless to say, I had my share of errors. My worst experience came when I had to write a program using a loop to print the numbers from 1 to 200. Seemed simple enough. But, imagine my surprise when I got back a 200 page printout with 1 number on each page! A missing semicolon after a PRINT statement was the culprit. (I used that printout for scrap paper for a very long time.) Even though it was often frustrating, I knew from that point on that I wanted to find a way to work with computers for a career, but that took some time to happen.

From 1975 to 1978 I was a graduate student in Oceanography at the University of South Florida. I frequently wrote FORTRAN programs to analyze data. One big program contained over 1000 cards! From 1978 to 1981 I was an Environmental Specialist in the Florida Keys restoring mangroves and seagrasses destroyed during bridge construction. In 1982, I saw one of the first microcomputers on the market in the window of a Radio Shack at a mall in Miami, Florida. It was gray, had a black and white monitor, 16K (yes K, not M) of memory, a clunky keyboard, and a cassette tape recorder that stored programs. It also cost about $2000! A year later, I obtained a used TRS-80 Model 1 for considerably less and stayed up for three days straight learning to program in BASIC. Shortly after that, I decided to make a career change and began teaching computer programming at a high school in the Florida Keys. Realizing I had a lot to learn, I went back to school and got an Educational Specialist degree in Computer Education from Barry University in Miami, Florida.

Around 1993, I had my first encounter with the World Wide Web and Netscape's predecessor called Mosaic. I scrounged an old Macintosh computer and began learning HTML which had to be written from scratch with a word processor because there was no such thing as an HTML editor. In 1997, I created Georgia's first online course...using the World Wide Web. In 2000, I joined the staff of a virtual school to teach computer programming.

Computers have certainly come a long way since 1970, with many features we take for granted today such as color monitors, the mouse, laser and ink jet printers, diskettes and hard disk drives, modems, CD ROMS and network capabilities. Even in this fourth generation of computers, the trends have continued: smaller size, faster, cheaper, and more capabilities. Sometimes I think I would like to give up my computer and take up woodworking, but I certainly could not do my current job without a computer. I would like to see more computer technology available to benefit people with disabilities. Someday, I expect computers and people will be able to directly interface for all sorts of as yet unimagined reasons! I will probably have retired by then, so it is up to young people like you to discover those possibilities and make sure the technology is used appropriately."

B. Jordan
08/06/03

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

Required Discussion Post

We commonly think of the computer as a means of making things simpler or easier. However, computers can also be frustrating. Proceed to the Discussion Group area and describe the way that the computer most frustrates you and suggest "your vision" for improvement in this area for the future.

Post your description and ideas in the “02.10 Computers in the Future” discussion post and respond to two other students' comments.

This assignment is worth 5 points.

Dig a Little Deeper

Interview an older person (at least 20 years older than you, but the older the better) in your community (family members are acceptable) who uses computers in his or her job. Ask the person to describe how computers have changed in his or her lifetime. The historical account should cover the person's first encounter with a computer and follow in chronological order his or her personal experiences with a computer, ending with a prediction about the future of computers. Ask all of the following questions.

1. What kind of work do you do that requires the use of a computer?
2. When did you first see a computer?
3. What did the first computer you saw look like?
4. Did you want to use the computer at first?
5. What was your reason for using the computer?
6. What did you learn about the computer that you did not know before using it?
7. Would you be willing to stop using the computer and return to the way you worked without it?
8. What kind of computer hardware and software would you like to see developed in the future?
9. What type of training did you receive?

Compare how your own experiences/attitudes about computers differ from the person you interviewed. Did you gain any new insight about the person you interviewed or the history of computers?

Note: This activity is intended to enhance your learning experience. There is nothing to submit to your instructor for a grade.

A QBasic Review

Before you move on to the next assignment, please make sure that you can do the following:

1. Discuss some of the changes that have taken place in computers over the last 20 years.

Computers have had a long and interesting history. Ten or twenty years from now, think about how you would answer the questions in this assignment if a young reporter interviewed you.