Teach: The History of the Development of Information Technology

The History of the Development of Information Technology

The smartphone in your hand has performance several orders of magnitude greater than the computers that filled entire rooms half a century ago. How did this astonishing progress occur? As the starting point for "Information II," we will look back at the history of the development of computers and networks and learn the laws that have continued through these changes and the patterns of how society changes.

The Development of Computers and Moore's Law

ENIAC (1946, United States), known as one of the world's first electronic computers, used more than approximately 17,000 vacuum tubes, occupied an entire room, and consumed enormous amounts of electricity. Later, components evolved from vacuum tubes → transistors → integrated circuits (ICs) → large-scale integrated circuits (LSIs), while miniaturization, increased speed, and lower prices progressed simultaneously. Moore's law describes the pace of this progress. It is an empirical rule proposed in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, stating that "the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every 1.5 to 2 years." For half a century, it served as a guide for the semiconductor industry. The remarkable power of exponential growth, in which numbers double again and again, is the key point: doubling 10 times produces approximately 1,000 times as much, and doubling 20 times produces approximately 1 million times as much. That is why processing that once could be performed only by supercomputers now runs on smartphones. However, as miniaturization approaches physical limits, a slowdown in the law has also been pointed out in recent years.

The Evolution of the Internet and the Web

The origin of the Internet can be traced back to ARPANET, a network created in the United States in 1969. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee conceived the World Wide Web, and its spread among the general public began in the 1990s. The way the Web is used has changed in stages. In the early period called Web 1.0, companies and some individuals created homepages, while many people were in a one-way era in which they could only "read" them. With Web 2.0, which began in the mid-2000s, blogs, social networking services, and video-sharing sites created an interactive era in which anyone could become a sender of information. Content created by users themselves is called UGC (User Generated Content), and it became the main feature of the Web. In recent years, the concept of Web3, which aims for decentralization through blockchain technology, has also been discussed.

Information Systems Repeatedly Shifting Between Centralization and Decentralization

The form of information systems has moved back and forth between "centralization" and "decentralization" over time. In the early period, terminals were connected to one large general-purpose computer (a mainframe), creating an era of centralized processing. During the 1980s and 1990s, the spread of personal computers caused processing to become decentralized on users' own devices, and the client-server model, in which tasks were divided between clients and servers, became widespread. From the latter half of the 2000s, cloud computing, in which data and processing are entrusted to data centers on the Internet, has once again made systems more centralized (cloud computing will be studied in detail in Lesson 4). In recent years, the increase in IoT devices has also led to the decentralized trend of edge computing, which processes data near the devices. It is accurate to understand that the optimal form continues to change according to technological progress.

Technological Development Changes Society

An important pattern that can be understood from the history of information technology is that "technological changes reshape the systems of industry and daily life themselves." E-commerce sites have greatly changed the retail industry, video streaming has changed broadcasting and film, and social networking services have changed news reporting and advertising. The fundamental transformation of existing industrial structures through digital technology is called digital transformation (DX). At the same time, the gap between people and organizations that can keep up with the speed of change and those that cannot (the digital divide) also tends to widen. The purpose of studying history is not to memorize dates, but to gain a measuring tool for thinking about "the next change."

Practice Problems

1. State what Moore's law is, and explain why the "exponential growth" indicated by this law is astonishing by giving specific multiples.
2. Explain the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, focusing on the "senders of information" and the direction of the flow of information.
3. Explain how the form of information systems has repeatedly shifted between "centralization" and "decentralization," using the terms mainframe, personal computer, and cloud.