Saturday 27 August 2011

An APPLE that day changed the World away...!

Those were the days when MITS ALTAIR 8800 mircocomputer was seeming insane inspite of its internal technical design which was the first of its kind. Hobbyists who work on it were sensing the difficulty in ‘on-off’ing the whole system of switches in order to make a calculation or perform any other kind of operation on it. And if by mistake a switch is mis-operated or a power failure occurs after clicking the required set of switches, then the user can only sit back and weep….. In the earlier days of Computers, it used to be such a difficult and tedious job instructing a machine, the interface is just made up of switches and LEDs in its front panel with which the user had to perform all kinds of operations that are required to be done.


Feels like quite unimaginable, isn’t it…???! Yes, it is.

In early 1970s, a duo of Steves, namely Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs wanted desperately to bring a change in the world of computer technology, they had already invented the ‘Apple I’ personal computer, which looked nothing more than just a mother board wrapped up in a specially designed wooden-box and put up a keyboard on the top of it. They were now in the line of introducing second version of their personal computer, the Apple II. The Apple II came with an external 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II, attached through a controller card. The Disk II interface, created by Steve Wozniak, was regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components in those days. The two Steves didn’t want their Apple II PC to just be another tech- hobbyists’ toy, rather they wanted it to be used by all the people, in their daily lives, so they looked up for something additional that would help it to be so.

And exactly at the very same point of time, there had been a creation called VisiCalc:
A student, named Dan Bricklin, of Harvard Bussiness School, was seated in the classroom, watching his professor lecturing on how to calculate the estimations and how to analyse the future fate of a company’s income by taking the profit/loss rate of the present and previous years of the company. It was to be done very carefully, as it’s not just mathematics but the prediction of a company’s future, a situation where one mistake would mean disaster. The student was feeling difficulty in performing the calculations as whenever a new investment rate adds-in, the entire process of calcutions has to be erased and re-done again. So, this student thought to put it all into an electronic spreadsheet and build a computer program which would do this ‘erase-all-and-redo’ work by itself and would give out the derived accurate result. So, he met his friend Robert Frankston who was a programmer and discussed the idea with him. After some months of hardwork on
the idea, they came up with a computer program called VisiCalc, which would do the business estimates and would help the people to count their stars before forwarding with an investment in the shares of a company, which many people would do day in and day out.


Apple creators, the two Steves had met Dan Bricklin and Robert Frankston, and all four agreed upon putting the VisiCalc into the Apple II computer.


Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak participated in the ‘West Coast Computer Faire’ on April 16th 1977, displaying their Apple II infront of the whole world. The architechture built into the Apple II has mesmerized everyone in the exhibition and the VisiCalc had become the main attraction of the product.
That day, the Apple II had incarnated itself as a powerful business tool in the market. Apple II was the biggest commercial success and became the engine that shaked the world in those times.
Apple Inc. from then on went to make new revolutionary changes in the PC market.


Steve Jobs, once visited the Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. The Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) had introduced the world’s first ever computer operating system with GUI (Graphical User Interface). It’s been a very distinctive invention. And Jobs was fascinated by the GUI of Xerox Alto and had forseen the future computer world that would depend entirely on GUIs. He then on strived to introduce the best GUI equipped commercial personal computer into the world. Apple Lisa was to be the next release by Apple, but unfortunately Steve Jobs was pushed out of the Lisa team due to some mishaps, and he took over the project of Macintosh. Lisa won the race by becoming the first PC with GUI to be introduced into the market but had become a commercial failure. Then in 1984 ‘Macintosh’ was released by Apple which went on to become a commercial revolution of the PC market, and was considered Apple’s masterpiece.


Since that day, Apple had changed the way people interacted with the computers. The idea taken up by the Apple computers to develop the graphical interface for the operating systems has brought in many revolutionary advances and had became the reason of today’s world with many finest operating system. The graphical interface for the computer users was the biggest thing that would ever happen in the field of personal computers. It then on went into every application and led all the programs and products to go gaga with the graphical interfaces. Many companies since those times, had believed that GUI is going to be a very big thing and started to restructure the operating system methodologies into a graphical form.


It didn’t ever stop anywhere in the history and is now being the most widely used interface for the computer operating systems.

One Apple in a very distant history, that fell on Newton’s head had changed the world in one way, and another Apple in these modern times of technology, that emerged in a garage of two friends had changed away the world yet again, as never imagined before.

Whatever may be the change, it all started with an ‘Apple’!






Written by:
Krishna Kanth
(a techNITian)






Monday 8 August 2011

Early Evolution of Earth’s mightiest non-Humans:


In the early years of the eighteenth century, 1812,  a man in his early 20s was sitting in a room  just like on any other day and looking at a table of logarithms. He believed there would be many errors in them, and wanted to make out some way to calculate those logarithmic tables precisely. He always believed that it might be achieved by using a machine than by human hand. There were some mathematicians who were his colleagues, they too were trying to solve the tables by breaking down the operations to be performed on those logarithms between many computers (here ‘computer’ refers to a human who computes, just like a ‘driver’ refers to the human who drives, as there weren’t any electronic devices in those days) and these computing humans weren’t skilled much and were capable of performing only additions and subtractions. By observing this mass of people giving not-exact  trials everyday, the man thought ‘how would it be if these unskilled people can be replaced by a machinery which can perform many kinds of calculations with a highest rate of accuracy?’ .....  and that moment of time has changed the history of this world forever. That was the birth of an idea for the development of machines which can do mathematics accurately, and that man who had been the source of the idea was the person whom everyone in this present world of technology is aware of, and mainly those from Computer Science field would owe him forever, Charles Babbage.

Charles Babbage, the ‘father of computers’ is so called  as he had developed the ideas and models of machanical devices that  perform calculations, and those designs that he invented were very much similar to the modern computers which you, me and many billions around the world are now using. Similarities like the separation of data and program memories, operations being instruction based, machines having separate I/O unit, etc., are quite the same in the present day computers.  His designs had made many scientists around the world to start thinking of the subsequent developments that can be implemented on those designs without which you wouldn’t be reading this document in a computer. Charles Babbage, since being dawned on with the idea, had started to develop a machine called Difference Engine which had really made the difference in the earliest world of computer technology by making the computations of  polynomial functions, calculate series of similar values by using the method of finite differences.  His machines were among the first mechanical computers of this world to be ever emerged.


After the development of the Difference  Engine had worn out, he then started to design another, this time a more complex machine called Analytical Engine. It was not a single physical machine, but a sequence of different designs. He worked on the development of that machine until his death. The Analytical Engine includes sequential control, branching, looping and have been the first mechanical device to be Turing-complete.

Ada Lovelace was one of the very few people who completely understood the Babbage’s ideas, and had been the first one to write a program for the Analytical Engine, has become the World’s first programmer ever. In 1979, a comtemporary programming language as an honour had been named after her, Ada.

After Charles was dead, his designs were undertaken by London Science Museum, there many scientists have worked for a very long time span of some years and brought a personified form to Charles’ designs of both the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine.


Those discoveries in the early days of the computer technology’s development taken up by an infinite number of scientists for further revolutionary improvements had been resulted in the world that we are now living in this present day. These were the people who had been the reasons of our human world’s invaluable development in every possible field of technology and redefinition of the lives of many people around the world..!!

I wonder how the idea of making machines work for humans had entered into Charles’ mind that day, but we all should be very thankful that it happened, else our human imagination would quickly runout of thoughts to have a picture of how our world would be like without any of the present techonoligical miracles and wonders that we are now witnessing.

One thing is precise, ‘Computer’ has been the only son in the world who is claimed of being wanted to be the child of many fathers(scientists) in this world,  but it all went into Charles Babbage...!!! God bless his soul. Thank Him very much, for he changed our lives forever...!!!

P.S: Here is an exclusive photograph to you  all. The very SOURCE that had been the birth place of the ideas that we just looked into,  the very corner stone of the revolutionary and ground breaking changes that took place in the world, the source is the brain of Charles Babbage:



 Written by:
Krishna Kanth
(an 'NIT'ian)