Computers are ubiquitous.  You don’t need to be a genius to know that.  This article was typed on a computer.  A computer was used to print the magazine.  The internet was used for research.  Maybe you’ll read this story on the Technograph’s website, and you’ll probably share it on Facebook and Twitter too.  While you’re online, you’ll check your email, get instantaneous sports updates, share information with people via the click of the mouse, and sync your calendar (and your friends’) to your phone.  You might pay your bills and buy a song or two while video chatting with a friend halfway around the world.  She asks you a question, and in about ten seconds, you can find the answer. Our lives revolve around computers – but how did this technological explosion take place and when?

If you’re an Apple fan, the story goes a little something like this.  Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, who knew each other from high school, decided to try to sell Wozniak’s machine (the Apple I) in 1976.  Not many people took the computer seriously, however, until the Apple II was previewed at a trade show the next year.  Apple’s first personal computer, along with the advent of the Apple Disk (the easy-to-use floppy disk) caused an increase in company size and sales.  The release of the Apple III in 1980, coupled with the company’s new thousand employees and managers, made Apple a technology force to reckon with.  They were ready to take sales abroad.

Answering to its competition, Apple aired a commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl introducing the Macintosh and depicting “the IBM world being shattered by a new machine.”  Today, Apple is known for their sleek designs of the iMac desktop; the iBook, MacBook, and PowerBook laptops; iPods (from the first generation to the new iPod touch); Mac software such as iLife; dozens of gadgets and innovative features; and most recently, the iPad and the iPhone, which have redefined the way that people connect by offering hundreds of thousands of apps.

Of course, not everyone is an Apple fan; that’s why the Mac vs. PC debate still rages.  Sure, there’s the old joke, “How do you crash Microsoft Windows?” (answer: “Start Microsoft Windows”), but the truth is that the IBM PC has been incredibly successful since its introduction in 1981.  It was introduced with novel and useful third-party applications and on-screen menus.  Windows 1.0 was introduced in 1983; OS/2 in 1987; 3.1 in 1991; and Windows 95 four years later.  Internet Explorer was the first browser built into an operating system, introduced in 1998.  With Windows 7 the newest operating system on the market, the PC is still going strong. 

Though it may seem to many young people of Generations X and Y that computers are an innate characteristic of human life (and indeed, today’s college students have always had computers in their homes and schools), it was not always so easy to connect to the rest of the world.  Neither is it true that computers are an entirely recent invention from the 1980s.  The makings of the first computer actually began in the 1930s. The Z1, from 1936, was the first freely programmable computer.  In the 1940s, computers such as ENIAC1 were used by companies to perform high power mathematical functions.  U of I’s John Bardeen and Jack Kilby, respectively, invented the transistor (1948) and integrated circuit (1958). The 1950s were characterized by new programming languages.  ARPAnet was the first internet in 1968, and the 1970s gave rise to floppy disks, word processors, and computing companies.

Today, computer technology is used for almost everything.  The possibilities are endless; it’s mind-boggling to think of the nearly infinite number of ways that we are connected to people, places, things, and ideas.  No one can predict what the future holds for computers and technology.  All we can do is look back on how far we have come and reflect on the ways in which computers have changed the way that people of the world live their lives.