A brief history of the computer

Such developments have helped make today’s PCs and Apple Macs truly mainstream objects: according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, 75 per cent of all UK homes owned a computer by 2009. The internet has proven to be one of the most effective drivers of mainstream computer uptake. In 2009, 71 per cent of UK households had an internet connection, but home computers are no longer alone in being able to exploit it.

Games consoles, smart phones and other computerised devices increasingly support wireless networks and access the internet: HTML was originally written (see below) to be platform independent, and more advanced web applications are made possible through application frameworks such as Flash or Java, which provide a standardised environment for more advanced web apps. With these available for a range of devices, the browser, operating system and even the underlying hardware is quickly becoming less important for web users.

What this means is that, while full-sized computers have long faced competition from compact laptops, netbooks and most recently net tops, many of their most popular applications can now be tackled by a high-end smart phone. Larger alternatives such as the iPad and its Android-powered rivals may soon present a serious challenge to our current notion of the home computer. Just as advancing technology made the PC an indispensable tool for the modern home, such advances might ultimately make it obsolete. The future of personal computing might – literally – be in our hands.

MAKING A PACKET – THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET

While the invention of transistors, integrated circuits and the move to mass production established the foundations of the personal computer revolution, it’s the internet that has truly unleashed the computers potential. A communication medium so powerful and desirable that it has helped push PC technology into everybody’s homes and beyond. But while mass internet use is a phenomenon of the last decade, the network’s foundations pre-date many of the technologies that made personal computing possible – including even the microprocessor.

ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern internet, as it was in 1973 when the UK got its first connection

The internet’s roots date back to the late 60s, and early work in the US on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a computer communications network developed jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal was to find a way to share information between the users of various computer mainframes. Like established phone systems, data transmissions had previously relied on circuit switching, where an electrical circuit is created between two parties for their exclusive use in exchanging information, but researchers had started considering something fundamentally different.

ARPANET was designed from the start around the concept of packet switching. Instead of information being sent over dedicated point-to-point connections, the network groups data into parcels that are electronically stamped with an address. Data packets are sent into the network and routed to their destination by nodes that read the address and forward the packet appropriately. The key advantage is that a single link can be used to send data concurrently to multiple recipients, with packets from several streams intermingled as necessary.