So its the year 2000. The last 200 years in
particular have been spectacular
for technology; heres a little list to give you an idea.
Please note: This isn't meant to be anywhere
near a comprehensive list, just
a taster...
1801, Joseph-Maire Jacuard developed an automatic
loom controlled by
punched cards.
A type of centralized heating, using hot water,
was used to a limited
extent in Great Britain about 1816, but the first successful central
system, introduced in 1835, used warm air. This system subsequently
came into extensive use in the U.S. Steam heating was developed
about
1850.
1820 Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar (1785-1870),
of France, makes
his "Arithmometer", the first mass-produced calculator.
It does
multiplication using the same general approach as Leibniz's
calculator; with assistance from the user it can also do division.
It
is also the most reliable calculator yet. Machines of this general
design, large enough to occupy most of a desktop, continue to
be sold
for about 90 years.
1822 Charles Babbage (1792-1871) designed his
first mechanical
computer, the first prototype for the difference engine.
The earliest photographs on record, known as
heliographs, were made
in 1827 by the French physicist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
(1765-1833).
It was 1829 that the first steam trains started
commercially running,
with Stephensons' Rocket being built as the first locomotive to
be
used for transporting passengers and freight.
Electromagnetic reaction, first observed by
the French physicist
André Marie Ampère in 1820. If a current is passed
through a
conductor located in a magnetic field, the field exerts a mechanical
force on it [the conductor].
The principle of electromagnetic induction
discovered by the British
scientist Michael Faraday in 1831. If a conductor is moved through
a
magnetic field, or if the strength of a stationary conducting
loop is
made to vary, a current is set up or induced in the conductor.
The first electrical instruments for telegraphic
transmission were
invented in the U.S. by the American inventor Samuel F. B. Morse
in
1837 and in Great Britain the same year by the British physicist
Sir
Charles Wheatstone in collaboration with the British engineer
Sir
William F. Cooke (1806-79).
Morse's apparatus, which sent the first public
telegram in 1844,
resembled a simple electric switch.
The first successful airship was that of the
French engineer and
inventor Henri Giffard (1825-82), who constructed in 1852 a
cigar-shaped, nonrigid gas bag 44 m (143 ft) long, driven by a
screw
propeller rotated by a 2.2-kw (3-hp) steam engine.
In 1854 the French inventor Charles Bourseul
(1829-1912) suggested
that vibrations caused by speaking into a flexible disk or diaphragm
might be used to connect and disconnect an electric circuit (q.v.)
,
thereby producing similar vibrations in a diaphragm at another
location, where the original sound would be reproduced. A few
years
later, the German physicist Johann Philip Reis (1834-74) invented
an
instrument that transmitted musical tones but could not reproduce
speech. In 1877, having discovered that only a steady electric
current could be used to transmit speech, the American inventor
Alexander Graham Bell produced the first telephone capable of
transmitting and receiving human speech with its quality and timbre.
In 1861 the first successful color photograph
was made by the British
physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who used an additive-color process.
It was 1879 that Thomas Edison developed the
first commercially
practical incandescent lamp.
In 1884 Lewis Waterman (1837-1901), a New York
insurance agent,
patented the first practical fountain pen containing its own ink
reservoir. Waterman invented a mechanism that fed ink to the pen
point by capillary action, allowing ink to flow evenly while writing.
And in 1886 the worlds first petrol powered
motor car was invented by
Karl Benz.
During the 1880s the American statistician
Herman Hollerith
(1860-1929) conceived the idea of using perforated cards, similar
to
Jacquard's boards, for processing data. Employing a system that
passed punched cards over electrical contacts, he was able to
compile
statistical information for the 1890 U.S. census.
1895 is the year that the cinema was invented,
with Louis and Auguste
Lumiere developing the first film camera.
The Italian electrical engineer and inventor
Guglielmo Marconi is
generally credited with being the inventor of radio. Starting
in 1895
he developed an improved coherer and connected it to a rudimentary
form of antenna, with its lower end grounded. In 1899 Marconi
established commercial communication between England and France
that
could be operated in all types of weather; early in 1901 he sent
signals 322 km (200 mi), and later in the same year succeeded
in
sending a single letter across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1902 radio
messages were regularly sent across the Atlantic, and by 1905
many
ships were using radio for communications with shore stations.
In 1903, at Kitty Hawk, Orville Wright made
the first successful
flight, which lasted 12 sec, in a self-powered craft.
The vacuum-tube diode was first developed by
the English physicist
John Ambrose Fleming (1849-1945). The introduction of a third
electrode, called a grid, interposed between the cathode and the
anode, forms the triode, which for many years was the basic tube
used
for amplifying current. (The triode was invented in 1906 by the
American engineer Lee De Forest.) The function of the grid is
to
control the current flow.
Lasers - Stimulated emission, which is the
underlying process for
laser action, was first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1917, but
it
wasn't until 1960 that the American physicist Theodore Maiman
observed the first laser action in solid ruby.
1926 was the year that Scotsman John Logie Baird invented TV.
As early as the 19th century, attempts had
been made to manufacture a
pen with a rolling ball tip, but not until 1938 did the Hungarian
inventor Georg Biro invent a viscous, oil-based ink that could
be
used with such a pen.
1943 The Harvard Mark I (originally ASCC Mark
I, Harvard-IBM
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) was built at Harvard
University by Howard H. Aiken (1900-1973) and his team, partly
financed by IBM - it became the first program controlled calculator.
Also in 1943 - The earliest Programmable Electronic
Computer first
ran (in Britain), it contained 2400 Vacuum tubes for logic, and
was
called the Colossus. It was used to crack the German coding 'Enigma'
machines.
1946 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator
and Computer): One of the
first totally electronic, valve driven, digital, computers.
Development started in 1943 and finished in 1946, at the Ballistic
Research Laboratory, USA, by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
It weighed 30 tonnes and contained 18,000 Electronic Valves,
consuming around 25kW of electrical power - widely recognised
as the
first Universal Electronic Computer. It could do around 100,000
calculations a second. It was used for calculating Ballistic
trajectories and testing theories behind the Hydrogen bomb. Its
program was wired into the processor and had to be manually altered.
The first commercial microwave radio link in
telegraphy began
operation between Philadelphia and New York City in 1947
1948 Manchester University - Mark I, completed,
the first computer to
use stored programs, based on the concepts of the Hungarian-American
mathematician John von Neumann.
The transistor was developed at Bell Telephone
Laboratories in 1948
by the American physicists Walter Houser Brattain, John Bardeen,
and
William Bradford Shockley.
Begun in 1954, and completed in 1957, FORTRAN
(FORmula TRANslator)
was the first comprehensive high-level programming language that
was
widely used.
1957 was the first space launch, with the Sputnik I.
1969 was the first Moonwalk.
1970 First RAM chip introduced by Intel. It
was called to 1103 and
had a capacity of 1 K-bit, 1024 bits
.
1970 - Development of UNIX operating system started, originally
by
Ken Thomson and Dennis Ritchie.
1971 - November 15 , First Microprocessor,
the 4004, developed by
Marcian E. Hoff for Intel, was released. It contains the equivalent
of 2300 transistors and was a 4 bit processor. It is capable of
around 60,000 Interactions per second (0.06 MIPs), running at
a clock
rate of 108KHz.
.
1974 - December MITS Altair 8800, the first personal computer
to be
available commercially released, by Micro Instrumentation Telemetry
Systems. In December 1974 an article in 'Popular Electronics'
inviting people to order kits for the computer, based on the Intel
8800 they cost just $397 each and despite the limited memory (256
bytes) and limited processing power around 200 were ordered on
the
first day. Produced by Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems
(MITS).
1976 was the Apple I launch year.
-------------------------
(References: The Top 10 of Everything 2000,
Russell Ash, DK.
A Brief History of Computing, Stephen White
http://ox.compsoc.net/~swhite/history.html
Infopedia, Future Vision Multimedia )
More stuff....
Genetic algorithms have been a talking point
around here lately.
There are many variations on the theme here, but basically it
involves testing several hundred individual units (made from a
collection of genes) and then breeding the most successful to
produce
another generation, in which you repeat the cycle.
In this way you get individual units which are more and more successful.
The way you measure success is very important.
It needs to be a
measure that shows more and less success, and that you can take,
for
instance the top 10% of, and use these in the next generation.
What you use for genes can be varied as well.
There is an article on
the New Scientist web site that uses layout on an FPGA for genes,
where the guy evolves a tone recognition circuit from a very small
number of gates.
Characteristics of a fractal picture have also
been used in the
past, with a human scoring in relation to the picture looking
more or
less like an insect.
We have used instructions, which we run in
a virtual machine. You could
use, however, special instructions, run via a case statement,
with a
"high level" language, that contains instructions for
monster
movement.
This brings me to my next point which is the
use in games. I know GAs
(genetic algorithms) have been used to produce monsters for games,
but I have yet to know of a game that continues to run these GAs
within the game. Part of the reason is the lack of control - if
GAs
can solve something, most of the time they will. This is very
difficult if they are set against the player.
My particular interest is tied up with my interest
in Artifical
Intellegence - I want to evolve minds from GAs. Because of the
amount
of computing power involved, I would like to run native instructions.
The difficulty is control over the entities. On current MacOS
they
could easily break the system, just by overwriting memory. And
taking
control away from them (via timeslicing) is difficult.
Perhaps it will be easier with MacOS X, or
LinuxPPC. Still there is
the question of operating system calls, or the like. If the entities
can break free, they probably will.
For anyone who is interested, a useful technique
is in the use of
parasites, or enemies. Quite often in a complex system, GAs will
stick at a local maximum. A parallel GA who's task is to find
conditions that break, or reduce the efficency of the primary
GA will
have the effect of improving the primary GA. This is the old
evolutionary "arms race".
On a totally different matter...
I was bought Riven for Christmas. Good game
should you get the chance
to play it. I was also very interested in the Making of Riven
that I
had with it. I still feel it will be great when we have that quality
of graphics real time, rather than pre-rendered. Still, it knocks
the
socks off most pre-rendered rubbish. At least Riven "feels"
like
walking around...
What is it with removable media at the moment?
Can't anyone make a
decision about which way to go. 1.44Mb floppies are worst than
dead,
they are useless pieces of junk fitted to every PC "just
because". I'm
not sure what you are meant to put on them. Some of the replacement
floppy disk systems have basically died, although Zip disks seem
to be
doing fairly well. I've recently bought a 250Mb USB Zip drive.
But
the disks are really way too expensive for the long run, even
the
100Mb disks. Tape is really a non-starter, except for server backup.
So what am I meant to do backups onto, and
also cart around with me, and
sent in the post to other people? I know I can email things around,
but to be honest there are still situations where emailing 100Mb
of
source gets you a punch in the head. I suppose there is CDR and
CD-RW. Its relatively cheap, but at the moment, I don't have easy
to
use tools on my Mac that take the pain of setting up out. Some
of the
PC tools are OK, and nicely drag-and-drop, but it still doesn't
have
the feel of my Zip disk. I'm constantly worried (probably wrongly)
about knocking it, or about it not writing properly.
And talking about removable media, especially
in terms of video
recording, what is happening? I know that "terrible standard"
VHS is
still king of the hill at the moment, and I sure wouldn't like
to
have to re-buy my movie collection (I'm not sure I could afford
too
over 5 years!), but something has got to give. DVD has been looking
like the way for a while, and I know stores are stocking more
and
more DVD titles. I also know DVD-RAM is a fairly well established
technology. But why do I get the feeling its not going to happen?
Perhaps its just me being jumpy. The rumours about digital VHS
don't
help of course.
The whole thing with removable storage media
in particular, seems to
be a disease of the computer industry. I know survival of the
fittest
can be a good thing, but it also can mean too much jumpyness,
which
means people and companies (both consumers and suppliers) won't
commit to a technology until its fully accepted. No one wants
to get
burnt, of course, but we are talking about a massive gap in the
case
of storage media.
I also know that standards like Zip are propietary,
and are not
likely to be accepted until Iomega gives up their intellectual
property (can you say "when hell freezes over") or until
lots of
deals with the various forces of the computing industry happen.
At
least when IBM were in control of the PC, when they put a technology
in (most of the time) everyone else accepted it.
As a piece of history, look at how long it took for CD-ROM to be accepted.
The same thing applies to operating systems
to a large extent. Linux (and the
other UNIX clones) has been around for ages. So why has it taken
the world
so long to catch on? As a sidenote, Corel Linux may be one to
watch. It's meant
to be the first Linux that can be installed by the man in the
street, and so may well
go somewhere.
I know we all have big hopes for Mac OS X.
Greater stability whilst
doing anything is something that all users would love, not just
developers. That's what protected memory, etc, etc, is really
about.
And it's probably about time. Apple very much know the advantages
the
Unix variants have. If Apple can really integrate Unix and MacOS
they
should really have a winner.
Rumours also abound about Windows 2000. Originally
meant to be the
coming together of Windows NT and Windows 98, there seems to be
a bit
of backtracking by Microsoft. We will have to see. I know of a
whole set
of compatability issues with a LOT of applications running with
Windows NT.
Whether it will be accepted by the business community is no doubt
something
that is concerning Microsoft, although they would never admit
it. Having run both, the
NT kernal is certainly superior. And they desperately need something
to hold off the Linux approach. (I don't suppose people pointing
out
that OS/2 had better windows support than NT would help matters
either.)
Well thats about it from me. I've been struck
down with flu over the
Christmas and New Year break. But it's finally retreating. I wish
you
success in the New Year, and hope that you get closer to your
dreams.
Best Wishes
Rob Probin
Lightsoft
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