Computers and Society

							      The decade of the 1980's saw an explosion in computer technology
and computer usage that deeply changed society. Today computers are a
part of everyday life, they are in their simplest form a digital watch or
more complexly computers manage power grids, telephone networks, and the
money of the world. Henry Grunwald, former US ambassador to Austria best
describes the computer's functions, "It enables the mind to ask
questions, find answers, stockpile knowledge, and devise plans to move
mountains, if not worlds."   Society has embraced the computer and
accepted it for its many powers which can be used for business,
education, research, and warfare.
      The first mechanical calculator, a system of moving beads called
the abacus, was invented in Babylonia around 500 BC. The abacus provided
the fastest method of calculating until 1642, when the French scientist
Pascal invented a calculator made of wheels and cogs. The concept of the
modern computer was first outlined in 1833 by the British mathematician
Charles Babbage. His design of an analytical engine contained all of the
necessary components of a modern computer: input devices, a memory, a
control unit, and output devices. Most of the actions of the analytical
engine were to be done through the use of punched cards. Even though
Babbage worked on the analytical engine for nearly 40 years, he never
actually made a working machine.
      In 1889 Herman Hollerith, an American inventor, patented a
calculating machine that counted, collated, and sorted information stored
on punched cards. His machine was first used to help sort statistical
information for the 1890 United States census. In 1896 Hollerith founded
the Tabulating Machine Company to produce similar machines. In 1924, the
company changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation.
IBM made punch-card office machinery that dominated business until the
late 1960s, when a new generation of computers made the punch card
machines obsolete.
      The first fully electronic computer used vacuum tubes, and was so
secret that its existence was not revealed until decades after it was
built. Invented by the English mathematician Alan Turing and in 1943,
the Colossus was the computer that British cryptographers used to break
secret German military codes. The first modern general-purpose electronic
computer was ENIAC or the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator.
Designed by two American engineers, John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, Jr.,
ENIAC was first used at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946.
      The invention of the transistor in 1948 brought about a revolution
in computer development, vacuum tubes were replaced by small transistors
that generated little heat and functioned perfectly as switches. Another
big breakthrough in computer miniaturization came in 1958, when Jack
Kilby designed the first integrated circuit. It was a wafer that included
transistors, resistors, and capacitors the major components of electronic
circuitry. Using less expensive silicon chips, engineers succeeded in
putting more and more electronic components on each chip. Another
revolution in microchip technology occurred in 1971 when the American
engineer Marcian Hoff combined the basic elements of a computer on one
tiny silicon chip, which he called a microprocessor. This microprocessor
the Intel 4004 and the hundreds of variations that followed are the
dedicated computers that operate thousands of modern products and form
the heart of almost every general-purpose electronic computer.
      By the mid-1970s, microchips and microprocessors had reduced the
cost of the thousands of electronic components required in a computer.
The first affordable desktop computer designed specifically for personal
use was called the Altair 8800, first sold in 1974. In 1977 Tandy
Corporation became the first major electronics firm to produce a personal
computer. Soon afterward, a company named Apple Computer, founded by
Stephen Wozniak and Steven Jobs, began producing computers. IBM
introduced its Personal Computer, or PC, in 1981, and as a result of
competition from the makers of clones the price of personal computers
fell drastically. Just recently Apple Computer allowed its computers to
be cloned by competitors.
      During this long time of computer evolution, business has grasped
at the computer, hoping to use it to increase productivity and minimize
costs. The computer has been put on assembly lines, controlling robots.
In offices computers have popped up everywhere, sending information and
allowing numbers to easily be processed. Two key words that apply today
are downsizing and productivity. Companies hope the increase worker
productivity, meaning less working which then allows for downsizing. The
computer is supposed to be the magic wand that will make productivity
shoot through the roof, but in some cases the computer was a waste of
time and money.
      Reliance Insurance is an example of computer technology falling
flat on its face, wasting a great deal of money, while producing little
or no results. "Paper Free in 1983" was the slogan Reliance used
because the it had just spent millions of dollars to put computers
everywhere and network them. The employees had E-mail and other programs
that where to eliminate paper and increase productivity. The company
chiefs sat back and waited for a boom in productivity that never arrived.
      Other examples of the disappointments of computer are not hard to
find. Citicorp bank lost $200 million dollars developing a system in the
1980's that gave up to the minute updates on oil prices. Knight-Ridder
tried to develop a home shopping network on the television, and lost $50
million. Wang laboratories almost went under when they put all of their
resources toward developing imaging technology that no one wanted. Ben &
Jerry's ice cream put in an E-mail system and out of 200 employees less
than 30% used the system. Everything attempted then is currently very
common today; on-line services provide stock and commodities quotes, QVC
is a home shopping channel on cable television, almost every picture in a
magazine has been retouched with imaging technology, and even JRHS has an
E-mail system that seems to be valuable.
      Other corporations have seized computer technology and used it to
reduce costs, but usually the human factor is lost. The McDonalds fast
food chain is an example of a company that has embraced computers to help
productivity and lower operating costs. The McDonalds kitchen has become
a computer timed machine, "You don't have to know how to cook, you don't
have to know how to think. There's a procedure for everything and you
just follow the procedure" . The workers have in essence become robots
controlled by the computer to achieve maximum productivity. The computer
knows the procedure and alerts the worker of events in the procedure and
all the worker must do is execute what the beeper of buzzer means. With
such little knowledge of the making of the food, workers have become
disposable, "It takes a special kind of person to be able to move before
he can think. We find people like that and use them until they quit." .
      McDonalds managers work even more closely with the computers that
control them. The computer generates a graph of expected business and
tells the manager how many people to schedule and when, all the manager
does is fill in the blanks with names. McDonalds computers also keep
close track of sales and expenditures, "The central office can check . .
. how many Egg McMuffins were sold on Friday from 9 to 9:30 two weeks ago
or two years ago, either in an entire store or at any particular
register." . The main things computers do in a manual job is to speed
things up, "Thinking generally slows this operation down." , and for this
reason computers have made manual jobs ones of extreme monotony and no
creativity.
      White collar jobs have remained virtually the same, computers have
just helped to enhance creativity and attempted to raise productivity.
E-mail, word processors, spreadsheets, and personal organization programs
are widely used by white collar workers. These programs help to make
impressive presentations, communicate, and keep track of everything so
the worker can get more done, and therefore less workers are needed,
dropping costs. This has not happened, over the last 30 years white
collar worker productivity has remained the same, while blue collar
productivity has almost quadrupled. This is due mainly to the fact that
white collar workers are required to think and adapt to situations
quickly, which computers at the moment are unable to due, they only
follow code to give a planned response. The blue collar job requires
less knowledge and skill, and so is easily replaceable by a computer.
      Computers though have not been a failure in business, they allow
information to be shared very quickly. The home office is a product of
computers, people can work from home instead of going into an office.
This has not become very popular due to the lack of touch between people,
the loss of contact. It is the human factor that helps to make business
run, the random thought that saves the day, something a computer is
incapable of doing. Computers may help quicken business, but they will
never replace people, only reduce their knowledge or creativity by
automating the process.
      Another form of computers is attempting to totally eliminate people
from the picture. Expert systems are large mainframe computers that have
the knowledge of an expert individual loaded into it, and makes decisions
that are very complex. An expert in field is chosen and interviewed for
sometimes over a year about their job and how they make decisions. All
of this knowledge is refined and put into a computer. Another person
then enters some statistics into the finished machine and magically a
large printout will come out of the machine in minutes with the answers.
Expert systems are used mainly in large investing corporations, but some
have been developed to help diagnose diseases. The hope is one day a
patient will lie down and a couple of sensors and probes will go over the
body and then a computer printout will have the name of your illness and
the drug to cure it. Expert systems have been used very little mainly
due to their high price and because of the lack of trust in them.
       Computers have also reached into other places besides business,
schools. Children sit in front of computers and are drilled or taught
about certain subjects selected by the teacher. This method of teaching
has come under fire, some people believe the computer should be a tool
not a teacher, while others believe why learn from a normal teacher when
a computerized version of the best can teach. The technology of today
could allow for a teacher in another country to teach a class through
video confrencing. The attempts to spread computer technology into the
class room have produced results and taught lessons as to how computers
should be applied.
      The Belridge school district in McKittrick California was one of
the most technological school districts in America. Every student had
two computers, one at school and one at home, which contained many brand
new teaching programs. The high school had a low powered television
station that broadcasted every day. The classes were small and parent
involvement was high. Even with all of these wonderful things one-third
of the first grade class was below the national average in standardized
tests after the first year. Parents were enraged that after all of the
money spent nothing had happened, that the technology hadn't made the
children become smarter, and so all of the computers were gone the next
year and traditional teaching was put back in place.
      Belridge is an extreme example of people expecting the computers to
do magic and make the children learn faster and better, much like
companies hoped to raise productivity. The children were left to learn
from the computer, which they did, but nothing changed things actually
got worse. One parent realized, ". . . good teachers are the heart and
soul of teaching." , because computers can only present facts and explain
them to a certain extent, where as a good teacher can explain to the
student in many ways.
      The US has about 2.7 million computers for 100,000 schools, a ratio
of about 1 computer for every 16 students. Experts say that, "Computers
work best when students are left with a goal to achieve. . ." , and
students are allowed to achieve this goal with proper direction from a
teacher. After many attempts in the 1980's to put computers into the
classroom a Presidential Plan was drawn up:
      1. Give computers to teachers before students.
      2. Move them out of the labs and into classrooms.
      3. One workstation at least for every two or three students.
      4. Still use flashcards for practice.
      5. Give teachers time to restructure around computers.
            6. Expect to wait 5 to 6 years for change.

This plan was to help guide the use of computers into the classroom, and
maximize their ability as learning tool. The computer will enhance the
future classroom, but it cannot be expected to produce results quickly.
One thing the use of computers in the classroom will help with is the
fear of computers and their ability to confuse people. Early exposure to
computers will help increase computer use in society years from now.
      The biggest network of connected computers is broadly referred to
as the internet, information superhighway or electronic highway. The
internet was started by the Pentagon as a way for the military to
exchange information through computers using modems. Over the years the
internet has evolved into a public resource containing limitless amounts
of information. The main parts of the internet are FTP (file transfer
protocol), gopher, telnet, IRC (internet relay chat), and the world wide
web. FTP is used to download large files from one computer to another
quickly. Gopher is much like the world wide web, but without the
graphical interface. Telnet is a remote computer login, this is where
most of the hacking occurs. The IRC is just chat boards where people
meet and type in there discussions, but IRC is becoming more involved
with pictures of the people and 3-D landscapes. Besides IRC, these
internet applications are becoming obsolete due to the world wide web.
      The most popular of the internet applications is the world wide web
or WWW. It is a very graphical interface which can be easily designed
and is easy to navigate. The WWW contains information on everything and
anything possibly imaginable. Movies, sound bytes, pictures, and other
media is easily found on the WWW. It has also turned into a business
venture, most large businesses have a "page" on the WWW. A "page" is a
section of the WWW that has its own particular address, usually a large
business will have a server with many "pages" on it. A sample internet
address would be "http://www.sony.com/index.html", the http stands for
hypertext transfer protocol, or how the information will be transferred.
"www.sony.com" is the serve name, it is usually a mainframe computer with
a T-1 up to T-3 fiber optic telephone line. The server is expensive not
because of the computer but because of the telephone line, a T-1 line
which transfers up to 150 megabytes of information per second costs over
$1000 a month, while a T-3 line transferring 450 megabytes of information
can cost over $10,000 a month. The "index.html" is the name of the page
on the server, of which the server could have hundreds.
      The ability for all of this information has made for a virtual
society. Virtual malls, virtual gambling, virtual identities, and even
virtual sex have sprung up all over the internet wanting your credit card
number or your First Virtual account number. First Virtual is a banking
system which allows so much money to be deposited at a local bank to be
spent on the internet. Much of the internet has become a large mail
order catalog. With all of these numbers and accounts, questions come up
about the security of a persons money and private life, which aren't
easily answered.
      Being safe is a new craze today, protection from hackers and other
people who will steal personal secrets and then rob someone blind, or
protection from pornography or white supremacists or millions of other
things on the internet. The recent communications bill that passed is
supposed to ban pornography on the internet, but the effects aren't
apparent. There are still many US "pages" with pornography that have
consent pages warning the user of the pornography ahead. Even if the US
citizens stopped posting pornography, other nations still can and the
newsgroups are also international. Programs such as Surf Watch and
Internet Nanny have become popular, blocking out pornographic sites. The
main problem or beauty of the internet is the lack of a controlling
party, "It has no officers, it has no policy making board or other
entity, it has no rules or regulations and is not selective in terms of
providing services." . This is a society run by the masses that amounts
to pure anarchy, nothing can be controlled or stopped. The internet is
so vast many things could be hidden and known to only a few, for a long
time if not forever. The real problem with controlling the interenet is
self control and responsibility, don't go and don't see what you don't
want to, and if that amounts to a boring time, then don't surf the net.
      When speaking of computers and the internet one person cannot go
unmentioned, Bill Gates, the president of Microsoft. Microsoft has a
basic monopoly on the computer world, they write the operating system and
then the applications to run of the system, and when everyone catches up,
they change the version. Bill Gates started the company in the early
1980's with DOS, or Disk Operating System, which just recently was made
obsolete by Windows 95. Bill Gates has now just ventured into the
internet and is now tangling with Netscape, the company with the Internet
monopoly. Netscape gives away its software for free to people who want
the basic version, but a version with all of the bells and whistles can
be purchased. Microsoft is hard pressed to win the internet battle, but
will take a sizable chunk of Netscape business. Bill Gates will likely
keep running the software industry, with his recent purchase of Lotus, a
popular spreadsheet, he further cornered the market.
      Computers are one of the most important items society posses today.
The computer will be deeply imbedded in peoples lives even more when the
technology progresses more and more. Businesses will become heavily
dependent as video confrencing and working from home become increasingly
more feasible, so businesses will break down from large buildings into
teams that communicate electronically. Schools may be taught by the best
teachers possible and software may replace teachers, but that is highly
unlikely. The internet will reach into lives, offering an escape from
reality and an information source that is extremely vast. Hopefully
society will further embrace the computer as a tool, a tool that must be
tended to and assisted, not left to do its work alone. Even so computers
will always be present, because the dreams of today are made with
computers, planned on computers, and then assembled by computers, the
only thing the computer can't do is dream, at least right now.