STS FINAL 1

Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age)

is a 21st century period in human history characterized by the rapid shift from traditional industry that the Industrial revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on information technology.

Messenger J.R. (1982) in his theory of information age

that the Information Age is a true new age based upon the interconnection of computers via telecommunications, with these information systems operating on both a real-time an as needed basis. Furthermore, the primary factors driving this new age forward are convenience and user- friendliness which, in turn, will create user dependence.

Information Age

is the idea that access to and the availability of information is the defining characteristic of this current era in human civilization.

Claude E. Shannon. At age 32, as a researcher at Bell Laboratories

It is coupled tightly with the advent of personal computers, but many computer historians trace its beginnings to the work of the American mathematician

Claude E. Shannon

published a landmark paper proposing that information can be quantitatively encoded as a series of ones and zeroes.

Claude E. Shannon

Known as the “Father of Information Theory,”

Claude E. Shannon

showed how all information media, from telephone signals to radio waves, to television, could be transmitted without error using this single framework.

United States Department of Defense 1970s

development of the Internet and the subsequent adoption of personal computers a decade later

Worldwide Web

used initially by companies as an electronic billboard for their products and services, morphed into an interactive consumer exchange for goods and information.

Electronic mail (email)

which permitted near instant exchange of information, was widely adopted as the primary platform for workplace and personal communications.

digitization of information

has had a profound impact on traditional media businesses, such as book publishing, the music industry, and more recently, the major television and cable networks. As information is increasingly described in digital form, business across many industries has sharpened their focus on how to capitalize on the Information Age.

Pre-mechanical Age

is the earliest age of information technology. It can be defined as the time between 3000 BC and 1450 AD. Early alphabets were developed, such as the Phoenician alphabet.

Phoenician alphabet

Early alphabets were developed, such as the .

India

Around 100 A.D., the first numbering system was created by the people from_________.

abacus

The calculator that was developed as the very first information processor, was the ________.

Mechanical Age

____ can be defined as the time between 1450 and 1840. A lot of technologies were developed in this era, as there is a large explosion of interest.

slide rule

(an analog computer used for multiplying and dividing) was invented

Pascaline

Blaise Pascal invented the ________, which was a very popular mechanical computer.

Charles Babbage

__________ developed the different engines which tabulated polynomial equations using the method of finite difference

Electromechanical Age

________ can be defined as the time between 1840 and 1940. This saw the beginnings of telecommunication

telegraph 1800s

The ______was used in the 1800s.

Samuel Morse in 1835.

The Morse code was created by _______

Alexander Graham Bell in 1876

The telephone was created by __________.

Guglielmo Marconi in 1894.

The first radio was developed by ______

Mark I,

created by Harvard University around 1940

The first large-scale automatic digital computer in the United States was the

Electronic Age

is what we are currently in. It can be defined as the time between 1940 and now.

ENIAC

was the first high-speed digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computer problems. This computer was designed to be used by the US Army for artillery firing tables.

FORTRAN
COBOL

high-level programming languages were created such as _________ for scientific research, and _________ for businesses.

4.1 The era of vacuum tube punch cards, like the ENIAC and MARK I.
4.2 The second generation replaced the vacuum tubes with transistors.
4.3 The third generation replaced transistors with integrated circuits.
4.4 The fourth and latest generation brought in central processing units (CPUs). It was in this generation that the personal computer (Apple II), and the graphical user interface (GUI) were developed.

There are four main sections of digital computing: