History of Computer's and Computer-mediated Communication's

One of the key aspects of human existence is our creations of community. We are social beings that desire interaction with other humans. Think about it, why do we consider one of the worst punishments in our correctional institutions to be solitary confinement? We have long known that the feeling and perception of being alone can have devastating impacts on people. It can lead to depression, feeling as an outsider, and even at the most extreme cases suicide. Along with the psychological impacts of being alone humans really can barely survive as individuals. We have created community throughout time, going back to prehistoric man in small kin based groups and evolving into complex cities with many ‘communities.’ Yet what is community? The ideas about community have long been debated and a general definition would be a group of people that interact and live relatively close in terms of geographical space and time. In the digital age where the internet is starting to become a dominant medium of interaction, especially with younger generations, the idea of community is again changing. The internet allows a community to form in a new medium, where geographical space and time become almost irrelevant. As long as you have a computer you can connect to internet, you can participate in a virtual community.
In order to understand virtual communities you have to look at the creation of computers and computer-mediated communication technologies. For computers were never originally designed to communicate with each other, instead they were seen as information processors. The first ‘computers’ were people, as the definition stems from the 17th century for one that computes, mainly in the realm of mathematical problems. The idea and definition of computers as a machine and not a person started to develop later in the 18th and 19th centuries as people began to work on complex mechanical machines that aided people in doing complex math problems.
The abacus, a simple counting aid, which is thought to have been invented in Babylonia (now Iraq) in the fourth century B.C is considered one of the first computer’s in the sense that it aided a person in computing (add link to pic). These counting machines developed over time into complex mechanical machines. A key figure(s) in the history/evolution of computers is Charles Babbage and Augusta Ada Lovelace (Bryon). Babbage’s big idea was the Analytical Engine.
This mechanical computer concept would have been operated using punch-cards similar to that of the Jacquard loom (link to an explanation/pic) (also worked using punch-cards). Lovelace and Babbage thought the machine could perform simple conditional operations. (insert pic link) His idea was important because of the punch-card concept that can be considered a read only computer due to the punch-cards. These punch-cards can be seen as some of the first ideas of the ‘computer program’ that are essential in running computers. Ada Lovelace worked with Babbage and saw the potential of the analytical engine beyond mathematical problem solving. She is often accredited with being one of the first great idea creators of the computer program and seeing the vast potential that the machine’s output of numbers could represent more than numbers themselves, such as musical notes.
As with almost all great technological achievements and ideas, the creation of computer’s was happening in several locations at about the same time in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s . Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, completed the first general purpose programmable calculator in 1941. (insert pic link). It wasn’t until late 1930’s and early 1940’s that computers made the switch from mechanical machines to electrical machines.
During the war the allie relied on mainly women as computers.
Colossus, a British computer used for code-breaking, is operational by December of 1943. ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzor and Computer, is developed by the Ballistics Research Laboratory in Maryland to assist in the preparation of firing tables for artillery. It is built at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering and completed in November 1945.

It wasn’t until the electric age that the term ‘computer’ as we know it started to develop. The first computers were room sized machines that were essentially a calculator. These early computers were completely dependent on having a person present to feed it information to process. These early computers didn’t have screens
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Beep, beep, beep, the eerie sound that was broadcasted all over the world on October 4, 1957. The sound was created by a small 2 foot satellite that was launched by the Soviet Union. The satellite may have been small the psychological and political impact it made changed not only the United States but the world. The US government and the people got a big slap in the face. We realized that if the Soviets could launch a satellite into space then they could put a nuclear weapon on the tip of that rocket instead of a satellite and strike any target anywhere in the world. Many in the military and the government realized how vulnerable we were. This is why they created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in February 1958.
The goals of ARPA were to create military technology that would keep us ahead of the Soviets. One of the greatest achievements of this research was that of ARPANet. The reason for the need of ARPANet was that our older telecommunications were all centralized and could be knocked out of commission if a nuclear bomb was set off in the United States would cripple the United States ability to govern and counter-attack. The idea of ARPANet pulls from the realization that researchers working for ARPA were spread all over the country and they wanted to access and use the