6th Week; A BREIF HISTORY OF THE COMPUTER AND INTERNET

We began the lecture by watching a scene out of the movie Johnny Mnemonic. It showed some of the early ideas of a computer.

Babbage.
He was the man who created the first computer machine.
The engine was designed to calculate & print mathematical tables.

Xerox PRAC in the early 70s, a think tank (group of people) developed ideas to make the computer better, e.g. Mouse, the graphical user interface (GUI) & pull-down menus.

Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak were the inventors of Apple.

‘Killer application’ (accounting program) was brought about in 1979.

IBM – International Business Machine.

In the lecture we also watched an animated short film about the internet, and how it works. It showed how one computer can read another computer through cables.
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READING; What’s new about ‘New Media’?
It is hard to determine what is ‘new’ in technology, because the rate of change in media is so rapid, a list of new technologies quickly becomes dated.

Three interrelated social and technological process;
digitisation and convergence
interactivity
networks and networking.

We can define new media as those forms that combine the three Cs:
computing and information technology (IT), communications networks, and
digitised media and information content (Miles 1997; Rice 1999; Barr
2000)

Lievrouw and Livingstone (2002: 7) in their observation that any approach to thinking about new media needs to take account of three elements: he artefacts or devices that enable and extend our ability to communicate the communication activities and practices we engage in to develop and use these devices the social arrangements and organisations that form around these devices and practices.

The Internet represents the newest, most widely discussed, and perliaps most significant manifestation of new media.

The Internet constitutes the electronic network of networks that link people and information through computers, and increasingly through other digital media technologies, and allow for both interpersonal communication and information retrieval (DiMaggio et al. 2001).

INTERNET HISTORY, three elements;
1st - Established in 1957, Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), electronic mail being perhaps the major communications innovation
2nd - development of a common set of networking protocols, which enabled researchers in the various local area networks (LANs)
(Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf develop in 1974 a common switching protocol that could meet the needs of an open-architecture network environment, which came to be known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/internet Protocol).)
3rd - 1990s, development of the World Wide Web (www).

FOUR FEATURES OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB;
1st - Colour, pictures, music, audio, as well as data & text
2nd - Hypertext (allows point-to-click access)
3rd - Hypertext then became more apparent with the development of web browsers
4th - Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http), websites.

The telecommunications industry experienced rapid change in the 1980s and 199Os, moving from being public monopolies or highly regulated companies providing ‘plain old telephone services’ (POTS), to becoming a sector involved in the delivery of a complex range of value-added network services (VANS).

Interactive media forms are those that give users a degree of choice in the information
system, both in terms of choice of access to information sources and control over the outcomes of using that system and making those choice. Interactivity is a central concept in understanding new media, but different media forms possess different degrees of interactivity, and some forms of digitised and converged media are not in fact interactive at all.
Interactive - ‘the extent to which Communication reflects back on itself feeds on and responds to the past’

Interactive - two components; interconnectivity and interoperability
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In the tute we discussed writing our essay, and how to do so in a structured way.
Intro (what essay is about, what way essay is heading)
Body (Justify argument, 3 topics, with 3 paragraphs each topic)
Conclusion (sum up argument)

We also discussed the lecture, a few points taken;
The main servers are in America
Internet is a network of networks