WEEK 6: a brief history of the computer and internet

Reading:
This week’s reading was called: “What's new about 'new media'?” From the article I found out that the new media is always changing. There are always improvements on technology even though it is called new media is it in fact always in improvement and reevaluate. The most predominant example of ‘new’ media is the internet. When we consider the implication of the World Wide Web, the internet has developed and created new media stream. This shows the evolution of the media. The internet has taken a dramatic change and has grown massively over the decades. The improvement of the internet has permitted new ways of communication to merge, like computing and new media telecommunication or new media; all of these are considered as one unique stream of communication.

Lecture:
This week’s lecture was about the history of the computer and the Internet. The first basic form of a computer was the Abacus, used c 3000BC. In the 19th century Charles Babbage created the ‘Difference Engine’ which allowed engineers to calculate and print mathematical tables. Alan Turing made the first working computer to break German codes in World War Two. The first PC was released in 1975. Bill Gates developed a ‘computer language’ for people to understand the computing process. We then had a discussion about the internet during the lecture; the internet is a network of networks and the Web is a component of the internet. It is only a feature of it.

Tutorial:
Choose an article on Wikipedia and show its accuracy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonia
At first I went to read the article and found that it was quite accurate for everything that it says about New-Caledonia. I decided to read it another time to make sure everything was right. While reading I was taking to my friend from New-Caledonia telling her about what I was doing, we arrived to the geographical part of the article and that is when we read that the Island was 350 kilometers long whereas New-Caledonia is about 500 kilometers from south to north. It was a great example of how Wikipedia can be a bad reference. It was not the first time that I was using Wikipedia but it was the first time I was looking for inaccurate information and I am very surprised on how easy it is to get false references.