Illustrations

one of the Babbage inventions Figure 1. A calculating machine designed by Charles Babbage.
computer from 1950s Figure 2. Model showing off a Univac mainframe.
cpu timing diagram Figure 3. Timing diagram (partial) for an 8086 CPU.
computer hisotry montage Figure 4. Montage of images from an online computer history presentation.
inside of a hard disk Figure 5. A computer hard disk with its cover removed.
dual cpu motherboard Figure 6. Image of a motherboard that can take 2 quad-core CPUs.
sampling of IT textbooks Figure 7. A few books covering IT topics. 
<html>
In strict HTML, an HTML document 
must begin and end with the html tag.
<header>
The header is used for data about the
document that you do not want to display.
</header>
<body>
Everything inside the body tags will be
displayed. An html document should only
have one body section.
The following code is shown below as it
would display in your browser:
<h2>this is a class-2 headline</h2>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
<p>This paragraph contains:
<b>bold text</b>
<i>italic text</i> and
<em>emphasized text.</em>
</body>
</html>

this is a class-2 headline

This is a paragraph.

This paragraph contains: bold text italic text and emphasized text.

Figure 8. Some basic HTML tags.

Information Technology and Web Basics

Introduction

It may be asserted, however inaccurately, that computer science was introduced to Earth by Babbage and first codified in modern form by Turing. I am, alas, no expert in computer science. But it should be mentioned here, to go off subject slightly, that the alleged extraterrestrials that have been in recent contact with earth are totally familiar with computer technology. If their civilizations are millions of years old, then it is extremely likely that computers existed elsewhere long before they existed on earth. And if you make the next major leap and entertain the possibility of past lives -- or spiritual immortality, however you want to look at it -- then many of us have undoubtedly been mixed up with computers at other times and places in our experience.

What I am trying to get at is that the idea that computers are something new is essentially a myth. It's a myth about a lot of other things, too, but the current subject is computers. So it is my considered opinion that the computers we currently have running on this planet are a mixture of human inventiveness and past-life recall.

That leaves computers, then, on a similar level to nuclear war, psychiatry, religious dogma, and human suffereing. Been there, done that. The challenge, then, is not so much to understand computers as it is to survive them. While it is unlikely that a computer could be programmed to create a machine dictatorship, as is depicted in The Matrix, it could be almost that bad. Computers, in short, enable a total big brother type of society. They are also extremely good at controlling complex tasks flawlessly, unattended for long (in human terms) periods of time. They are therefore excellent tools of production in various and diverse situations, particularly in the field of routing and relaying electronic messages. And that is one of their biggest uses on this planet.

Computers, however, have at least two big weaknesses. First, they can be disabled (at least in their current form) by a large electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) in their vicinity. And second, they are essentially open in nature, like a person who compulsively tells everyone he meets all his deepest secrets (have you ever met someone like that?). They can't keep a secret worth a damn and their supposed usefulness in storing data which needs to be kept secure is totally misplaced. Therefore, if you can convince a population that it must have secrets, and if you can get them to tell those secrets to a computer, and then if you can make them uninformed enough to not know how to access all their own secrets, as well as everbody else's, whenever they want to, then you can put together a nice little police state where the majority of the population exists under a carefully controlled kind of terror. And that, by experience, is not healthy for a society.

The obvious answer is to just not use computers for stuff like that, and that is where this little write-up is headed. I'll tell you about some of the cool stuff you can do with computers assuming you really are not that concerned about security of data, getting money stolen from you electronically, and other such esoteric garbage.

There is a whole big bunch of well-intentioned guys working their guts out to make computer systems secure for private information. But I'm not going there. It's basically the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The answer is to figure out how we can live together in an atmosphere of complete honesty and openness. Secrecy and secure data are basically lies.

Resources
General

The World Wide Web is the blessed grandchild of the Computer Age. As such, its pages are FULL of information about the history, theory and practice of the computer sciences.

W3C School

The World Wide Web Consortium's educational site is the premier site on the subject of internet technology, with an emphasis on the open-source technologies that are available.

Microsoft Developers Network

This is another very full site sponsored by THE source of proprietary software for computers, networks, and the web. I find this site less well-organized and less useable than the W3C School, but it services a huge and ever growing population of professional, amateur and student programmers who are working on the whole spectrum of potential computer applications.

Downloads.com

Downloads is the premiere site for downloadable software. But it is only one of thousands of places on the internet where you can get free, demo, and shareware software. There are sites that specialize in niches like Mac apps, portable apps, freeware, retro software, music software, etc. The bastion of open source software projects on the internet is Source Forge.

Books

One of the problems in learning some part of computer technology is the the voluminous amount of detail connected with the average advanced application. One handling for this is books. If you are willing to shell out the required funds, you can get a reference book focused on a certain piece of technology that can function as your handy reference for all the little details. Some of these books have well-written explanations of how to use these technologies, but most are weak in this area. Though most of these details are available on the web, I find that source a bit difficult to use. Until web documents become easier to access and navigate, books will serve a role as technical references.

Basic HTML

I have illustrated some of the basic HTML tags in Figure 8. Currently, HTML is the language on which all web pages are built. HTML documents only contain TEXT characters. They can be written using any software that can produce plain text documents. That gives the web a certain proletarian feel. You don't have to be rich or famous to create a web page. You just have to know how to write HTML. The tag paradigm is the basis for a whole collection of languages that fall under the banner of XML. XML is actually a standard, or specification, for creating languages, or documents, of this type. One benefit of such documents in the computer world is that they can be created and used by computers under software control alone, yet are also human-readable (with just a text file reader). Tags define different classes and types of data within a document. Heirarchies of tags can be defined, and tags can have attributes.

The basic concept behind XML is that the main XML file contains the content, the data, of the document. Then one or several different files can be associated with the main file that transform the content into the desired format for presentation to the human user. Computers don't need this formatting data, so the main file should not include it. HTML breaks this rule by including formatting tags and attributes in its main documents. Style Sheets were introduced in the mid-90s to move document formatting out of HTML. The widely- used standard for Style Sheets is called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Version 2 of CSS was introduced in 1998. It does not replace HTML formatting, as thousands of pages were written prior to the introduction of CSS. But web developers are being pushed to update their pages to use CSS for page formatting. The plan is that future browsers will begin to drop support for some of the old HTML formatting attributes.

Information Technology and Web Basics

return to top