Living Through the Exceptional Evolution of Technology
Since I was first introduced to technology and could truly understand the overwhelming capabilities that it can produce, I was fascinated with who and how someone could begin to understand the concept before it existed. I became intrigued while reading “A Brief History of Computing and the Web: From 17th Century Computers to Today’s Digital Empires”. In this article, many things piqued my interest. One especially is when the author notes “Gunther’s Rule could be thought of as an early analog computer that used the principals of logarithms to multiply and divide” (McFadden, 2020). Edmund Gunter was an accomplished English mathematician. He was a serious inventor when it came to the advancement of complex logarithms. The quote I pulled explains the early creation of computers and where classic computing comes from, as it is all tied back to math and arithmetic. This was hard for me to comprehend at first, as I could not believe the first signs of computers started with pencil and paper. This made me realize how incredible our advancement in technology has been. I feel as if we are living at the peak of technological advancement compared to the 17th century when Gunther’s Rule was first created.
The birth of logarithmic computing set the stage for Ada Lovelace’s involvement with the “analytical engine”. Ada Lovelace can be looked at as one of the first women to display and understand computing at a national level. She worked on a proposed structure of an analytical engine. She invented complex algorithms for the “computation of Bernoulli numbers”, all while using this engine. Ada Lovelace played a role in the advancement of computing by pioneering the first rule sets that are used vigorously throughout computers. Although the analytical engine was never fully completed, Ada’s algorithms set the stage for everything we love today about computers and how they process information.
Jumping to the epicenter of customization through technology, where the first personal computers became widely available in the 1980s. In this era, we see the first-time technology and the internet itself became easily obtainable, although still complex to understand. The internet was no longer for large corporations, but for the common man and family. In the article “Black Inventors and Pioneers who have Influenced the Way we use the Internet and Technology Today”, one person who I believe was innovative in this era was Dr. Philip Emeagwali. Emeagwali was a computer scientist born in Nigeria and then studied mathematics and marine engineering. He is credited with assisting in the design of an intense program for the world’s fastest computer, which was “made up of over 60,000 widely distributed microprocessors and ran more than 3.1 billion calculations per second” (Childnet, 2020). This is incredible as a computer this fast at the time was never thought to have existed. A computer of this caliber opens the doors for many advancements, especially for a topic that is relevant today called “Quantum Computing”. This accomplishment was also justified as the Institute of Electronics. Electrical Engineers presented Emeagwali with the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize. These microprocessors that he worked on processed information so quickly there were endless possibilities for innovation beyond the work that was set by Emegwali. We can see the technology that was utilized is still present today in a variety of search engines.
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