Technology is everywhere. We use computers for school and add it into our fantasies. So many people can no longer imagine life without their devices. It has affected the way we see and deal with the world, even how we make worlds. We are so reliant that technology changed how we basically see the world. How much of technology’s history do you know?
Imagine a little wooden box with metal wheels on the bottom. Attached was a small red button in the right corner. Well, that was the original computer mouse, only it wasn’t called that. The original computer mouse was called the X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System because the device moves the cursor up and down and side to side. However, the creators realized that the X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System was too long and no one actually wants to say that. They brain stormed and decided it looked like a rodent and so they changed the name to “mouse.”
The term computer bug originated in 1947, a time when a computer was still the size of a room. Harvard’s brand new computer suddenly stopped working for seemingly no reason. But after searching, Harvard’s technicians found it was due to a moth that got stuck inside of the computer, creating an electrical fault and making the first bug a literal bug.
On Dec. 17, 1903, the first successful airplane was completed. The first man on the moon was July 16, 1969. This means the first man to fly on Earth is only 65 years, 6 months, and 28 days before the first man to fly to the moon, survive in space, and come back safely. People went from trying to fly on Earth to finding a way to breathe in space, leave Earth safely, come back, and stay in space without dying. All in the span of about 66 years, which is less than the average human lifetime. There were people alive who remembered the first airplane that took off and the first man on the moon.
In 1969, Apollo 11 became the first spaceship to take humans to the moon. You’d think the process of getting there would be extremely complicated but the machine had 4KB RAM and a 32 KB hard disk, less processing power than today’s average phone. Today’s cell phone has more than 100,000 times the processing power of what Apollo 11 used to take people to the moon around 55 years ago.
Imagine working late and wanting coffee, but you don’t have time to stop; you and your friends have to keep going. Frazer and Paul Jardetzky faced this problem, but it led to an amazing creation. The first-ever webcam was created in the year 1991 at the University of Cambridge to monitor a coffeepot for them and their fellow students.
Zeus. What do you think of when you read that? The Greek god or a computer virus? For some, it might be the virus. In 2007, Zeus Trojan was made, a computer virus that has infected millions of computers. It is the first-ever computer virus made to successfully steal money, more specifically banking information. The virus is still active and Windows systems are the most at risk.
Let’s think about Bluetooth—literally, because that’s how we get the history of this name. The 10th Scandinavian King Harold l ate lots of blueberries, like a lot, a lot, to the point where his teeth were stained blue. Bluetooth became his nickname. But that’s not the only thing the designers of Bluetooth took from him— the symbol for Bluetooth is lifted from his gravestone.
With technology all around us, it seems normal–right? We have it for everything. For some that normality is terrifying. Technophobia is the fear of technology. Cyberphobia, the fear of computers, can cause real problems because people may avoid going to places such as school, not to mention being fearful because of how much life is now online. On the opposite end, however, is Nomophobia, the fear of being without a mobile phone. The inability to be without a phone, when the battery is running low causes anxiety to run high. It can feel as if people’s only connection to the world is through their phone.
