evolution of computers

The second half of this book is mostly about the evolution of computers and the people who helped design them.  At first, computers were very primitive and very large.  They were mostly used by the government or large firms for variuos reasons.  They were very expensive for the time and were very slow.  After twenty or so years the computer phenonemon took off.  People became much more interested into computers, companies started investing largely into computers and they began hiring young kids to do some of their work, regarding computers.  One of these people was Bill Gates.  Unfortunatley, another reason for the huge interest for development of computers was the Cold War.  The Soviet engineers embarrassed the American engineers by launching the first artificial satellite.  This prompted large amounts of money into science and research for computers and among other things.  The reason for this was that we wanted to become a superpower again and compete with the Soviets when it came to science, engineering and electronics.  The rest of the second half of the book has to do with networking and starting to become a virtual community of people and ways of getting in touch with people via the Internet.  The main idea of this book is show us the development of computers throughout the history of our society and the reasons for this.  The Cold War, general interest in computers and technology, the understanding of the effect of computers in a society.  I think that the development of computers is a very good for the world.  It makes alot of work much easier and quicker and it really changed the way we run live our lives.  Although, with the good comes the bad.  There are some downsides to computers.  It keeps children away from doing other acitvities outisde which can play a role in the a childs mood and personality.  Many people are happy with the way things are going wtih computers and the only change I see in the future is that computers become smaller, faster, more reliable and advanced.