Timeline Mini-Project

Electricity itself is a mystery to most people these days and it is often taken for granted. I myself barely know the basics through my biochemistry coursework, and it seems astonishing that the first instance of an induced electrical current was almost 200 years ago. Invented by Michael Faraday, these rings made use of coils of wires moving through magnetic fields to generate current and serve as the basis of many forms of generators. Without an induction ring, this project wouldn't exist.

So much of communication in life has moved into the format of electronic mail, or e-mail. Announcements for classes or job opportunities, even Christmas and birthday cards are sent using e-mail. The invention of this application is typically attributed to Ray Tomlinsen, being the first to use the "@" to indicate an address in 1971. However, the first known instance of an electronic mailing system was called MAILBOX and it was first used at MIT in 1965.

The first ever computer that I used was an IBM 386 clone which was given to my dad during his senior year at the Air Force Academy. After the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, which was one of the first commercially available personal computers, many companies started developing "clones" which were designed to be as similar as possible to the source IBM model.

WWW. The three letters that start almost every URL that defines the location of each page you visit while using a browser. So interconnected that there are impossibly many pathways from any one point to another. The original browser was developed and released in 1992 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. This first browser was text based and quickly followed by the point-and-click enabled browser Mosaic in 1993 which quickly grew in popularity.

While my own knowledge of computers is limited I do know two coding languages, Java being the first. I didn't think I would do much of anything with computer science after learning the basics in my senior year of high school but I found that I just couldn't leave the 1's and 0's alone. The language itself was released in 1995 and came with it's own interpretive software, the Java Runtime Environment which allowed the same code to run on any computer.

When discussing the history of computers, it is frequently noted that a single byte could take up the space of a modern phone, while the full storage of a modern computer would take up several buildings. Today, our capacity of storage has reached exceptional levels, particularly in solid state drives such as those used in the PC I built myself. These SSDs use 3D XPoint (cross-point) which two PCIe lanes to allow connectivity with M2 slots along a computers motherboard.