COMPUTER CRAZY AND BAD

"On two occasions, I have been ask [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
The folowing is a large collection of stories and anecdotes about clueless computer users. It's a baffling phenomenon that in today's society an individual, who might in other circumstances be considered smart and wise, can sit down in front of a computer screen and instantly lose every last shred of common sense he ever possessed. Complicate this phenomenon with a case of "computerphobia," and you end up with tech support personnel having phone conversations that are funny in retrospect but seem like perfectly valid motive for wil machine gun shooting sprees at the time. You will read stories in this file that will convince you that among the human race are human-shaped artichokes futilely attempting to break the highly regarded social convention that vegetables should not operate electronic equipment. And yet, amidst the vast, surging quantities of stupidity are perfectly excusable technological mishaps -- but that are amusing nonetheless. After all, even the best of us engages in a little brainless folly every once in a while.
Most of these stories are true. Some hapened to me personally. Some happened to friends of mine. Some are considered urban legends, but even most of these are more likely to have happened in some form or another than not. Skeptics look at such stories and doubt their truth. But reason, comon sense, and experience tell me that if you sit someone who isn't computer literate (even a smart someone) down in front of a computer, you're bound to accrue anecdotes no less outrageous than these. You'd be surprised.

WOW MACHINE MANIPULATE DATA

A computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions.

The first devices that resemble modern computer date to the mid-20th centuri (around 1940 - 1945), although the computer concep and various machines similar to computers existed earlier. Early electronic computers were the size of a large room, consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers.

1. Modern computers are based on tiny integrated circuits and are millions to billions of times more capable.
   
2. Today, simple computers may be made small enough to fit into a wristwatch and be powered from a watch battery. Personal computers, in various forms, are icons of the Information Age and are what most people think of as "a computer"; however, the most common form of computer in use today is the embedded computer.
   

The ability to store and execute list of instructions call programs mekes computers extremely versatile and distinguishes them from calculators. The Church–Turing thesis is a mathematical statement of this versatility: any computer with a certain minimum capability is, in principle, capable of performing the same tasks that any other computer can perform. Therefore, computers with capability and complexity ranging from that of a personal digital assistant to a supercomputer are all able to perporm the same computational tasks given enough time and storage capacity.

UPS...TIMELINE OF COMPUTER HISTORY

WHAT THE TIMELINE IS

This timeline explores the history of computing from 1939 to 1994. Each year features illustrated descriptions of significant innovations in harware and software technology, as well as milestones in areas such as commercial application and artificial intelligence.

HOW THE TIMELINE WORKS

Across the top of this and every timeline is a graphic with the years from 1939 to 1994 displayed as well as seven topic areas.
The timeline can either be brows using the links above (and appropriate Previous/Next and More links on each page) or searched for specific events.

AHAA...INTERNET HISTORY?

This Internet Timeline begins in 1962, before the word ‘Internet’ is invented. The world’s 10,000 computers are primitiv. They have only a few thousand words of magnetic core memory, and programming them is far from easy.

Domestically, data communicatione over the phone lines is an AT&T monopoly. The ‘Picturephone’ of 1939, shown again at the New York World’s Fair in 1964.

But the four-year old Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defensee, a future-oriented funder of ‘high-risk, high-gain’ reserch, lays the groundwork for what becomes the ARPANET and, much later, the Internet.

By 1992, when this timeline ends,

• the Internet has one million hosts
  
• the ARPANET has ceased to exist
  
• computers are nine orders of magnitude faster
  
• network bandwidth is twenty million times greater.