The first computer....

...did exist in Babylon, as I pointed out last week. And, as amos expressed his strong and extraordinary attention to this problem, I would like to solve the riddle. I think the soulution is to be found here: The word computer is derived from the latin verb "computare" being a derivation (I hope this is right) of "putare". In short, "computare" means "to calculate". And that is what the Babylonians developed: A device to support simple mathematical operations. This device is called "abacus" and has been improved and re-invented several times since then. An abacus is a rack made of wood with two wires running parallel to each other. On the wires, there are beads which can be moved from one side to the other of the abacus. Thus, you can carry out addition and substraction at least.
Have a nice weekend :-)

If you are interested in...

...which computer was the first, then have a short glance at this site: http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa050298.htm
Here you can see a brief summary of the development of the very first freely programmable computer designed by Konrad Zuse in Germany... It is a bit funny to read thathe called the language he invented to create short programmes "Plankalkül" - a typical German word, I guess :-)
Actually, the title "First Computer" of the world is an honour that lots of inventors are given to. In fact, the first computer-like thing we know was designed in 3000 BC, probably in Babylon. I will have a look till next week to find out, how it worked.

Just one little request...

I think that the comments on the post "what a mystery" a very interesting, so please have a look at them! Maybe you even want to contribute to this interesting discussion - controversal views will be welcome! So have a nice weekend and enjoy the sun :-)

Funny thing to see....

After the very serious and pensive post below I just want to add one interesting thing. Mr. Hummel mentioned after our lecture that we might have shown the development of the hardware before the idea of the internet came into existence. So I used google (what else?) to find out something abou the origins of the devices we take for granted today. If you click on this http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/Archive/patent/Mouse.html link (I hope it works) you will see something that looks like a pencil sharpener but is in fact the first mouse designed in the 1960s. I think it is quite interesting to see the bottom of this device: You'll recognice to wheels which were used to convert the mecanical movement of the mouse on your desk into electrical impulses. Today, this funtion is performed by this little ball you see if you turn round your mouse. Admittedly, if you own a digital mouse, you will lokk into a red light - unfortunately no tiny ball at all :-)

What a mystery....

The internet is still a mystery to (almost) all of us. As a matter of fact, everything that is mysterical and unknown is seen as containing unpredictable dangers. I think the last talk showed us what a great difference there is between the real dangers and the supposed ones (like these bombs etc.). As a contribution to this public excitement about the possible dangers of the Net I would like to mention the film "feardotcom". I must have been in a quite insensible mood when I agreed to watch some horror films last night, one of which was "feardotcom"... Nevertheless, having survived the films, I began to think about the danger they try to show in it: They try to show how the Internet can reach our lives - as if there were a kind of link between the two spheres. (In the film, this link is described as the ability of the large neuronic network to save mental energy, e.g. produced by fear, and use it to control our minds.) Quite a horrible illusion! But what strikes me is that the Internet is treated like a really big mystery with a kind of life of its own. In my opinion, this illustrates how little we really know about the internet und therefore how little we can estimate the dangers the Net really contains. To cut a long story short: What I want to say is that this film that appeals to our natural fear of the unknown illusrates quite vividly why it is so possible that terms like "cyberterrorism" are coined and believed in by lots of people.
I think this is possible and fairly normal because of the human fear of unknown, mysterical things they do not understand...
What is your opinion on this topic? It would be really interesting to read your statements!

Some words about backbone...

One problem Katrin and I faced when creating our performance was the term "backbone" - there wasn't really enough time to deal with it. Additionally, our talk was so full of technical terms that we thought we should leave it out.
Nevertheless, Katrin talked about the NSFnet as a scientific network created in the mid 1980s. It was a non-commercial academic network created for free access. It linked five super computers of major universities whose names can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSFNet.
Well, this connection designed for sharing of data ran at a speed of 56 kb/s. It was connected to the ARPAnet by TCP/IP and now provided a kind of "backbone" - a network, to which other academic and local ones could connect in order to access the military big ARPAnet. And that's it. Its technical abilities were frequently improved (its speed today is 54Mb/s) and in 1990, when the ARPAnet was dissolved, it took all the tasks the ARPAnet had performed over. Thus, it even today functions as a backbone network connecting the small ones with each other....
I thought it is quite interesting to see how the whole system we use today quite thoughtlessly emerged - and still works :-)

Did you know...?

...that Al Gore claimed to be one of the initials of today's Internet? Did you know to what extent he really was? Or did you know anything about Archie and Veronica and the quarrel about their names? (in fact, archie was one of the first search engines...) These ones and other anectdotes connected to the history of the internet are waiting for you at http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html. This site offers a broad and entertaining, although not trivial, overview over the net's history. So if you have some time (I am convinced that lots of you won't :-)) ) just have a look at this site. Lots of small stories contribute to an image of the net that is not only purely technical.

Feedreader

Hello @ all...
I just wanted to say that I've tested the feedreader Gerolf proposed in his talk (you can find a link to download it on Gerolf's blog) for quite a week now... it seems to be a useful tool which can be used to organize the blogs you want to read effectively. You can choose from a number of blogs that are already provided, among which you can find the BBC, The Guardian and others. Therefore, I think, using feedreader can be of note for all of us even after the seminar, because one can easily read about what's going on in Britain and the US... Quite useful, I think...
I would like to raise one question, too: Shall our future posts be more general about experiences with blogging, feeds and other things like that? We've already told a lot about our topic and therefore, there is not much to tell anymore, is it? We COULD do further research but all in all, we were not able to tell quite a lot of new things, I guess. So what would you, and especially Mr. Hummel, suggest?
Have a nice weekend!