chat in real time to other people around the world, to the World Wide Web, which is a mass of information networked from places around the world. Nowadays, no matter where you look, computers are somewhere, doing something. Changes in computer hardware and software have taken great leaps and jumps since the first video games and word processors. Video games started out with a game called Pong...monochrome (2 colors, typically amber and black, or green and black), you had 2 controller paddles, and the game resembled a slow version of Air Hockey. The first word processors had their roots in MS-DOS, these were not very sophisticated nor much better than a good typewriter at the time. About the only benefits were the editing tools available with the word processors. But, since these first two dinosaurs of software, they have gone through some major changes. Video games are now placed in fully 3-D environments and word processors now have the abilities to change grammar and check your spelling. Hardware has also undergone some fairly major changes. When computers entered their 4th generation, with the 8088 processor, it was just a base computer, with a massive processor, with little power, running at 3-4 MHz, and there was no sound to speak of, other than blips and bleeps from an internal speaker. Graphics cards were limited to two colors (monochrome), and RAM was limited to 640k and less. By this time, though, computers had already undergone massive changes. The first computers were massive beasts of things that weighed thousands of pounds. The first computer was known as the ENIAC, it was the size of a room, used punched cards as input and didn’t have much more power than a calculator. The reason for it being so large is that it used vacuum tubes to process data. It also broke do...
