The world has been completely changed by the advent of personal computers. This is because they have radically transformed the way the world lives, works and conducts business. Computers actually arrived on the scene back in the 1930s and were the brainchild of one Konrad Zuse who produced what was then called the Z1 computer. While this was a giant innovation, this was far from the sophisticated machines that we have today.
That computer laid the groundwork for further research by others. In 1944, two men named John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry from Iowa University produced several innovations of the computer based on Zuse’s model. It was capable of producing simple to moderately complex arithmetic calculations and small but simple computing tasks.
Harvard University, then took it a notch higher and partnered with IBM, the business conglomerate in 1953 to produce what was then the world’s first sophisticated computer. Even then, computers were still gigantic and occupied huge spaces and used a lot of power.
The world as we know it today has been completely changed by computers. They now sit in almost every office space in most major cities of the world. It is hard to imagine business as we know it today without computers. Work would be grossly inefficient and cumbersome. Take for example calculations. It would not be possible for companies which hold a lot of material and inventory to process orders efficiently without computer power.
Computers have also made a giant impact in the field of communication. With the advent of the Internet, the World Wide Web or Information Superhighway, the world has become smaller and has even been referred to as a global village. Phrases such as “global market place” have also been coined to signify how computers have been able to link the world.
We mentioned communications and how computers have made a giant impact in this realm. Messages can now be sent and received via email instantaneously from one end of the globe to the other. This has almost rendered the regular snail mail obsolete. Then there are chat rooms, Instant Messaging and Video Messaging which have transformed the way people meet and interact across the globe.
All this has been made possible by computers connected to the Internet via wireless and wired networks. Large firms such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have contributed to this by running sophisticated web applications that have made it possible to chat in real time with someone on the other side of the globe. This has completely changed the way we conduct meetings and even run classrooms and training.
Businesses have benefitted tremendously owing to the advent computers. Companies can even open virtual branches in other countries without necessarily being there physically. Banks can even run on the Internet without possessing actual premises. Such has been the impact of computers to modern life. Sometimes they also have their own disadvantages in that some people accuse them of causing some to be thoroughly anti-social. It is also easy for some to develop multiple identities online to mask their true selves.