Is It A Computer? Is It A Phone? Wait, It Is Both… And More!

The development of technology over the years has been a source of wonder to many people, and during our lifetimes we will all see developments which will have us saying “I really never thought I would see the day…”. For people who remember a time when taking your computer to the car would have required multiple trips, the innovation of phones that act like computers is one such development.

Although the modern smart phones are still more phone than computer, the fact is that they are capable of more than the average desktop PC was even ten years ago. You can capture photographs and video footage, download music files, make phone calls (admittedly, this seems like a side-benefit with most smart phones) and use the Internet as well as many other capabilities.

The absence of a hard drive is all that seems to separate these phones from computers, but the memory that can be stored on the phone itself seems to render a hard drive unnecessary. It is not at all uncommon for Twitter users to see posts from friends who spotted something while on the move and took a photograph which they posted to the site. This would have been unthinkable up until recently.

Such is the technology that these phones even have touch-screen keyboards so that, instead of the old numerical keyboard with letters as a secondary function, you can type your text messages or emails as you would when using a laptop or a PC. It is a computer in all the typical senses, and it fits in your pocket. Many of us never thought we’d see the day.

The Rise Of The Laptop Computer

One of the main elements of technological advance is that over time, any platform will be made smaller. As we had the telephone, now we have the mobile or cell phone. As we had the gramophone, so we invented the record player and eventually the compact disc. And inevitably, while computers started out being so large as to fill entire rooms, so they became smaller.

Eventually, this led to the invention of the laptop computer – which happened in a very basic form as long ago as 1968. That form of the technology was notably different from the laptops we recognize today in many ways, but it set the wheels in motion for what we use in this day and age. What we see today is a refinement of the first laptop computer.

The real story with laptop computers in the last decade or so is in how they have become more prevalent and more powerful. As recently as the last decade, a laptop computer would not have been a purchase that any but the affluent could have considered. Now, they are so prevalent as to be in most homes in the Western world.

Due to their smaller size, laptop computers can be taken anywhere so long as you have enough battery life. This smaller size does mean a trade-off in terms of memory, and the most powerful laptop is still markedly less powerful than a high-end desktop PC – but as the technology improves, the gap keeps narrowing and laptops are now used for more than just the basics.

Computing And Language – A Marriage Made In Hell?

About twenty years ago, “computing language” meant one thing, and was something only comprehensible to trained programmers. Yet today, it is much more likely to refer to a type of slang that is used among online communities. This has brought mixed results, some of which may be good and others very, very bad.

Some people will be familiar with “Leetspeak” or “l33t”, or indeed “1337”, which is a specialized terminology made op from characters other than letters – and therefore cannot actually be “spoken”. It is most familiarly used among hackers, gamers, or people seeking to be seen as pertaining to those fields, and to the untrained eye is nonsensical and irritating.

The use of “text speak”, or more commonly “txt spk” is also partially a result of the development of the Internet. Usually achieved by dropping vowels from words (although not every vowel) as well as the introduction of digits and emoticons made from punctuation marks, it results in sentences like “Gr8! So u r in2 txt spk? Me 2! ”. Those who wish to be taken seriously avoid it.

Lolspeak, most commonly seen on the Lolcats website, is a mutation of text speak and takes its name partly from the text speak abbreviation “lol” (laughing out loud). It combines text speak with the deliberate use of an infantile form of speech – indeed, the Lolcats site is alternatively known as “I Can Has Cheezburgr?”. To novices, these dialects are all highly confusing

The Simplification Of Personal Computers

Once upon a time, anyone who knew how to do anything with a computer beyond switching it on would have habitually been referred to as a “geek”. Certainly, if you spent any more than an hour a day using a computer for anything other than work, you would have been considered uncool. However, recently the use of computers has become something that more people do than not.

The very idea of something like Facebook ten or fifteen years ago would have set alarm bells ringing among the cool kids. Computer users socializing was like dogs rollerblading – not normal, unsettling to look at and something to be discouraged. But as computers have got cheaper and easier to use, social networking is now all the rage.

The boundary between “geek” and “chic” has narrowed in many cases to a point where it doesn’t exist. Indeed, the idea of “geek chic” has really taken off, and it is not even an issue for many kids who have grown up in an age where the Internet is fairly widespread. Now it is those who do not use computers that are considered a little bit odd.

Like any social change, there can be debate as to whether this has had overall desirable results. Certainly, someone who works in computers or just considers them a hobby need not cringe every time they are asked what they are into. With any kind of mass use, a phenomenon can attract undesirable activity and publicity, but on balance most people seem happy with the diversification it has brought.

Your PC – From Box To Desktop

As time goes on, any technological development will be refined and re-refined until it is automatic and can be operated by a trained monkey – and then it will be honed some more. As easy as we now find it to operate a personal computer, there was a time when it required a great deal of messing around to get it initially set up, and in many cases every time you turned it on.

These days, you can take delivery of a personal computer one moment and be doing whatever you feel like with it ten minutes later. Many of the newer models do not even require much connecting, coming as many of them do with an integrated hard-drive and modem, so that you can switch everything on with the touch of a single button.

This appeals to users who would previously have found computers difficult to “get into”, as operating instructions have a tendency to resort to tech-speak at very short notice. However, it is something that may put off the more tech-literate users, as this level of usability comes at the expense of choice – you have no say in the software package that comes with the computer.

A “PC in a Box” may well be just the thing for a first-time buyer, but if you are more computer literate it will often be cheaper and more beneficial to put the system together yourself, even to the point of buying components from different sources to get things just right for your needs. This is something that is quickly learned as time goes on.

Great Things About Computers #6: Writing

The development of easier-to-use personal computers has contributed immensely to the ever-greater quantity of writing being done in this day and age. Although opinion will naturally be divided on whether this is a good thing, it has certainly democratized the process considerably, meaning that more and more people can get their writing published or publish it themselves.

To make a long story short, if you wanted to write a book in times gone past, you would have needed a typewriter or a complicated word processor – potentially costing more than was reasonable for a luxury purchase – in order to put together a readable manuscript to send to publishers. Now, it is standard to email a section of the finished draft to them instead.

The phenomenon of “blogging” has taken off in the last few years to the point where an overwhelming number of people now have personal blogs, and to the point where even the idea of blogging has been mutated successfully – witness Twitter, often referred to as a “micro-blogging” site.

There are some – often paid writers themselves – who decry the increase in blogging as somehow “devaluing” the idea of writing. This seems almost exclusively to be a territorial reaction to the threat of losing readers to someone who the reader can relate to. Certainly, some blogs make for awful reading, but the same can without a doubt be said of much of what gets published by paid journalists, too.

Great Things About Computers #5: Email

Before we had email, the world was a different place entirely – but it is hard to think how different because it has become such an accepted part of life that we hardly remember what we did before we could send and receive email. Most of us will use it at least once a day, and many of us will have an email client open for most of the day for one reason or another. It helps us work and keep in contact with friends.

Before email, the quickest way to get in contact with someone was to call them on the phone. Largely, this depended on them actually being there to take the call because not everyone had voice mail. Email just about pre-empted text messaging in terms of mass use, and was the first form of instant communication not to depend on both sender and receiver being available at the same time.

Email also had the advantage over text messaging of not being limited to a certain number of characters. If you phone someone just to chat, one is always mindful of the phone bill and is thus likely to keep the conversation brief. No matter how long your email, it won’t cost you any extra – in fact, it won’t cost you anything on top of your Internet subscription.

Email really comes into its own in a business context. A lot of information can be included (like a written letter), and it can be sent instantly (like a phone call) and picked up whenever the receiver is available (like a text message), thus combining all of the important benefits of the other forms while having no major drawbacks. You can attach bulky files with it and check when it has been received and read. It has made a big difference in work and personal life.

Great Things About Computers #4: Music

The development of technology dedicated to music has been constant during all of our lifetimes. There will be many people reading this who can remember a time when the choices available for playing music amounted to “cassette or vinyl”, with possibly an 8-track player thrown in out of left field. These days, more and more people are using their computers to find and play music.

Downloading has become a major part of the music market. Initially, the vast bulk of music downloading was done illegally through peer-to-peer file sharing sites. Mindful of the potential threat to their commercial viability, record companies used a combination of court action and the introduction of legal downloads to claw back much of this market.

Initially, MP3 players were something you had on the desktop of your PC to play songs that you had downloaded. As time has gone on, MP3s have become something you store on your computer to transfer to a dedicated player such as an iPod or, increasingly, a “smart” cell phone. These cell phones can be used to download songs themselves, too.

If you have a vast music library filled with old CDs, these can be transferred to the computer and then on to a player, or can be played through the computer’s speakers. A major advantage of this development is the ability to create playlists that take from a vast library, and make a radio or club DJ out of each of us as we seek to pick the best sequence of tracks.

Great Things About Computers #3: Gaming

If you have a computer for any reason other than work and/or the Internet then the chances are that you are a gamer. There are other ways to play games – dedicated consoles are one such way – but the increased amount of memory available with a home computer means that more complex games are best when played on a PC.

PC gaming really comes into its own on “thinking” games, where a large amount of data needs to be stored and recalled at short notice. Sports management simulations are one example of this, as they contain information on players and need to take account of a vast number of potential eventualities. To simulate tactical decisions as made by a sports coach takes a lot of information.

Personal computers also tend to have more capability to reproduce high-quality graphics and sound. You may need to buy dedicated graphics and sound cards to get the maximum from your PC, but games are available for PCs which are still not manageable on consoles, even with the innovation of consoles with their own hard-drives and the increasing development of CD and DVD technology.

Most people with a PC will have used it for gaming at one time or another, even if it is just a bored office worker playing Solitaire while waiting for something else to do. PC gaming ranges from the inherently basic to the hugely complex, and many of the popular console games of today started out as PC games.

Great Things About Computers #2: Data Storage

Information is everything. From the moment you are born, there is information pertaining to you, and a place for that information to be stored. As you go through life, you collect more and more information, and the pace of that information keeps increasing. The first time you get a bank account, the first time you get a job, every examination you sit – it all becomes information.

When information is created, it has to be stored. Walk into any office for any company or authority that has been in existence for any more than a decade, and you will find files that contain reams of paper with essential information on them. These are stored in boxes, cabinets and even entire rooms that take up space. One of the key innovations of the computer age is that this space can now be shrunk.

Any computer can store an amount of information which, if it were written down on paper, would fill rooms and rooms, and which may be needed at a moment’s notice. The job of the filing clerk has become immeasurably easier with the greater use of computers, which can automatically cross-reference information and make searching faster and easier.

From key information like banking details, to more personal data such as diaries and photograph albums, all information can now be moved onto a home PC, protected with passwords and unique information, and kept for a time when you want or need it. Information is everything, and with the right computer knowledge, it is now easier to keep track of.

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