The Villages - January 2020 - 30

oday, the internet is as
popular as ever. 2018 was
the first year in which more
than 50% of the world's population
used the internet, and, according to
trends shared by the International
Telecommunications Union, it shows no
signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Gone (thankfully) are the days of
dial-up internet that ties up your phone
lines or trying to find America Online
discs so you can read your email - we
can access the internet more easily
than ever before with much faster home
connections that often come included
with cable TV packages.
The internet gives us a chance to
communicate and share information
on a global scale - talking to friends
and family around the world, looking
up that actor we can't remember when
arguing about a movie, sharing what
we had for dinner and billions upon
billions of other opportunities we never
had before.

"LOGIN"
THE FIRST MESSAGE SENT VIA ARPANET
FROM UCLA IN CALIFORNIA TO
STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN THE 1960s
- A DISTANCE OF ABOUT 350 MILES.

JANUARY 2020

THAT WAS SOLD
PRE-ASSEMBLED
AND CAME WITH
A KEYBOARD
AND MONITOR.

Tero Vesalainen/iStock/Getty Images

Computers are all around us now - on our desks,
in our cars, in our bodies and high above us in orbit around
the planet.
While mechanical computers have existed for centuries,
digital personal computers as we have come to know them
really only first started appearing in the 1970s. Early computers were the size of a house - built in 1945, ENIAC (the
Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzer and Computer)
weighed nearly 30 tons and took up 1,800 square feet. It
was not until the invention of integrated circuits and microprocessors that computers became much more manageable
for the average person.
The first personal computers still were square, bulky machines that often didn't even include a screen. The Altair
8800 was a build-it-yourself computer released in 1974
by a company called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry
(MITS), and it was little more than a box with lights - the
only inputs were several switches on the front. However, it
was revolutionary at the time.
MITS hired two Harvard
students in 1975 to help develTHE APPLE II,
op the programming language
RELEASED IN
the Altair computers used.
1977, WAS ONE
Those two students - Paul
OF THE FIRST
Allen and Bill Gates - used
COMPUTERS

Photo courtesy of www.si.edu

COMPUTERS

http://www.si.edu

The Villages - January 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Villages - January 2020