Why this matters
This morning you probably messaged someone, paid for something without touching cash, and opened an app that guessed what you wanted. Twenty years ago almost none of that existed. Information technology did not arrive all at once: it came in stages, and each stage changed how people talk, work, learn and pay. Knowing the order of those stages is the backbone of this whole unit.
The idea
Five stages, roughly:
| Period | What arrived | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1940s to 60s | The first computers (ENIAC, vacuum tubes) | Military and scientific calculation only |
| 1970s to 80s | Personal computers | Computing reaches individuals |
| 1990s | The internet and the web go commercial | Information goes global, email spreads |
| 2000s | Smartphones | Mobile internet everywhere |
| 2010s onward | Cloud computing | Large-scale data analysis, AI, "IT as a service" |
Behind that hardware curve sits Moore's Law: transistors per chip roughly double every two years. It held for decades, which is why computers got so much faster so fast. It is now running into physics. Make transistors much smaller and electrons start slipping through barriers they should not cross (quantum tunneling), and current escapes where it should not (leakage). So the industry is chasing speed other ways: more cores working in parallel, and quantum computing.
Five changes to ordinary life came out of these stages: SNS, e-commerce, remote work, online learning and cashless payment.
Three newer technologies are worth naming. Autonomous driving uses AI to drive a vehicle; because a tenth of a second matters, it relies on edge computing, doing the thinking on the car itself rather than waiting for a round trip to the cloud. AR layers digital information onto the real world; VR replaces the real world with a generated one.
Picture it
flowchart LR A["1940s-60s<br/>first computers"] --> B["1970s-80s<br/>personal computers"] B --> C["1990s<br/>internet and web"] C --> D["2000s<br/>smartphones"] D --> E["2010s onward<br/>cloud computing"] E --> F["large-scale data analysis, AI,<br/>IT as a service"]
Worked example
A self-driving car sees a child step off the kerb.
Sending that camera frame to a data centre and waiting for an answer might take a few tenths of a second. At 50 km/h the car travels several metres in that time. So the decision has to happen on board, on the car's own hardware. That is edge computing, and it is chosen here for one reason: latency. The cloud is still used, but for things that can wait, like updating maps or improving the model overnight.
Notice the pattern that runs through the whole table above. Each stage did not just make machines faster, it moved computing closer to people: from a room, to a desk, to a pocket, to the road.
Your turn
Try the practice questions for this lesson. Put the five stages in order, judge some true and false statements about Moore's Law and e-commerce, and match AR, VR and autonomous driving to what each one actually does.
Take it further
Your community is deciding whether to move further toward cashless payment.
- Collect data. Ask ten classmates whether they usually pay with cash or with a card, app or QR code. Record the answers and find the most common one.
- Analyse the stakeholders. For a customer, a small shop owner, and someone with no bank card or smartphone, note one benefit and one drawback of a fully cashless society.
- Decide. Should your community move further toward cashless payment? Recommend one step and justify it from your survey and your table.
The third group is the one that decides the answer. Convenience for most people is not the same as access for everyone.
Recap
- IT arrived in five stages: first computers, PCs, the internet, smartphones, the cloud.
- Moore's Law drove the speed gains and is now hitting a physical limit.
- The social changes to know: SNS, e-commerce, remote work, online learning, cashless payment.
- Autonomous driving needs edge computing because waiting for the cloud is too slow.
- AR adds to the real world; VR replaces it.