Computers and their Influence on Human Development.
Computers will be the greatest influence on human development in the next fifty years. I can only talk about the next fifty years because beyond that, the only constraints are the imagination.
Most people will agree that computers are already a major influence on their lives. However,most would disagree that computers are the biggest influence on their lives,but there is a lot of growing evidence to the contrary that even the most ardent skeptic cannot ignore. .
The history of computers is very brief when compared to the rest of recorded history. The first form of a computer dates back to the abacus of ancient China and Babylon. There is still some dispute over who first invented it(Maxfield and Brown 41). Next was the Leonardo Da Vincis "machine" for arithmetic calculations (the credit is usually given to Blaise Pascal,but it was recently proven that Da Vincis was invention was a hundred fifty years earlier). Then there was Joseph-Marie Jacquards punchcards. Originally designed for silk looms ,the cards through later variation allowed the storage of programs for computers. .
Next came Charles Babbage. He invented the first of what we might today consider to be called a computer. In Babbages day the scientists who worked on mathematic tables, like logarithmic and trigonometric functions, were the ones called computers. The term computer was a job description well into the 1940s. Babbage proposed building a machine to calculate complex mathematical tables. He started work on his Difference Machine,but when it was partially completed he came up with another,more sophisticated device called the Analytical Machine. The Analytical Machine was never completed due to Babbages death. However, more than a hundred and fifty years later at London's Science Museum,a Difference Machine was constructed from original drawings. The device performed its first calculations and returned results to thirty-one digits of accuracy.