The Computer Revolution
The first working computers were developed for military purposes during World War II and the Cold War and were enormous in size and cost. Engineers began to resolve the size issue with the creation of transistors. Invented by Bell Laboratories in the late 1940s, these silicon pieces of equipment came into widespread use in running computers during the 1960s. As companies manufactured smaller and smaller silicon chips, computers became faster, cheaper, and more reliable. The design of integrated circuits in the 1970s led to the production of microcomputers in which a silicon chip the size of a nail head did the work once performed by huge computers. Bill Gates was not the only one to recognize the potential market of microcomputers for home and business use. Steve Jobs, like Gates a college dropout, founded Apple Computer Company in 1976. By 1980 the company had become a publicly traded corporation, turning its founder into a multimillionaire.
Microchips and digital technology found a market beyond home and office computers. Beginning in the 1980s, computers replaced the mechanical devices that ran household appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers, and refrigerators. Over the next twenty years, computers operated everything from standard appliances such as televisions and telephones, to new electronic gadgets such as VCR and CD players, fax machines, cell phones, and iPods. Computers controlled traffic lights on the streets and air traffic in the skies. They changed the leisure patterns of youth: Many young people preferred to play video games at home, rather than engage in outside activities. Consumers purchased goods online, and companies such as Amazon sold merchandise through cyberspace without any actual retail stores. Computers became the stars of movies such as The Matrix (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and Iron Man (2008). In 2010 The Social Network became a hit in portraying the life of Mark Zuckerberg, the primary developer of the social media Web site Facebook, which in 2012 had 900 million users worldwide.
The Internet—an open, global series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data, information, electronic mail, and other services—made social networking possible. The Internet grew out of military research in the 1970s, when the Department of Defense constructed a system of computer servers connected to one another throughout the United States. The main objective of this network was to preserve military communications in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. At the end of the Cold War, the Internet was repurposed for nonmilitary use, and it now links government, academic, business, and organizational systems. In 1991 the World Wide Web came into existence as a way to access the Internet and share documents and images. Search engines like Google and Yahoo were developed to allow computer users to “surf the Net” and gain access to Web pages. Consumers could shop online as they once had in stores, and researchers could find information previously available only in libraries. Politicians learned how to use the Internet to raise campaign funds and spread their messages to voters more widely and more quickly than they had been able to do in person or on television. Terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda, also went online. In 2010 around 75 percent of people in the United States used the Internet, as did nearly 2 billion people worldwide, about a quarter of the globe’s population.
Digital communication revolutionized globalization. Bill Gates’s computer software programs, along with the Internet and World Wide Web, dramatically reduced the time it took for trading partners around the world to converse and make business decisions. Consumers in the United States called customer service operators stationed in India and other remote sites. E-mail largely replaced postal mail, allowing Americans to instantly contact relatives, friends, or professional and business associates around the country or the world.