As we all know, everything is becoming digitize and information continues to become available unlike any time before.  More content at click of a mouse is available for you to find.  One of the biggest advantage of digitizing everything is that as long as you have a computer that can connect to the internet then you have the capability to locate information about almost anything that you can think of.  One of the draw backs about making everything digital is that the everyone is losing the ability to go a library to find a good reference on a certain topic.  No longer do you solely have to rely on paper books for certain references.  The digital world makes all information readily available with ease.

I had previously used ProQuest to look up some old news in old newspapers and just like anything that you try for the first time it was a bit overwhelming.  Depending on the subject that you are looking for you could have thousands of entries that become available after a single search and the difficult part is finding the source that you are going to use. There is so much information about the subject that you are looking for that you do not have the time to decipher through all of the materials that are available.  The best way to search through such a large volume of content is by searching for a more specific topic that will give you less material to look through but this method could also hinder the quality of the sources that you want to use.

One great advantage of having all of these sources available through the internet is that you can save tons of time.  Having all the sources digitize and cataloged for easy access saves a lot of time which can be spent looking for right source.  The ease of looking through all of the sources as fast as you can possibly look through them is an advantage that everyone benefits from.  We should thank those that took the time to digitize all sources that are available.  Another great advantage is that you can search through all of this material from your personal computer and you no longer have to go to a library and hand select certain sources.  The digital world has made almost everyone’s life a lot easier.

A great disadvantage to having everything digitize is that people solely depend on the use of a computer and forget how to search for content without the use of a computer.  What a different world it must be without having a computer?  How can anything get accomplish without a computer?  These are some simple questions that before computers existed would be easy to answer.  Today it becomes a burden to complete any project without the aid of a computer or some form of digital content.  We truly live in a digital world and we expect to have digital content available to us at all times.  When I was in high school and I had to complete projects for certain classes, I had to go to the library and search a card catalog to find resources to use.  Now almost every library that I have been to lately has a digital card catalog which is more efficient and saves the library space and money.

The digital content that is available to us is an asset that sometimes is taken for granted.  All of the hard work that is put into digitizing everything goes unnoticed.  I met a Marine who was part of the team that was scanning references into a huge data base which took well over a year to digitize and he said that it was no small feat.  It was a lot of work and many times they had to re-scan the material to ensure that a readable digital copy was produced.  Many data bases have been created to support the amount of people that are wanting to access them and now that those data bases are digitize everyone can access them at the same time.  No longer do you have to wait for a hard copy of something to be available.  This is another great advantage of having digital copies of everything; by having a digital copy available you make that source accessible to anyone who is looking for it.

Becoming digital has more advantages than disadvantages.  Making a source digital takes a great deal of time and money but once it becomes available for everyone to look up it is  worth every penny spent to make that source digital.  The more information that we seek to find in the digital world the more that we will see become digital.  It is unfortunate that with everything becoming digital we are relying more on the digital world than the actual things around us.  We must not forget that the many things that we find in the digital world come from a real artifact or document.  We will forever expect the help of the digital world to assist us in completing a task now that it has become a part of our daily lives.

The internet is something that we all use for various reasons and what I found to be extremely interesting was when the internet began to take form.  In the video “History of the Internet”, I was intrigued by when the process began.  In 1957 my parents were only a few years old.  They did not have a clue of what was taking place during their early years.  I always thought that the internet was something that was invented by some smart guy.  I had no idea that there was this great process of trial an error that took place over the course of four decades before that internet became a standard which would be recognized by all machines.  The creation of the TCP/IP really made things a whole lot easier for us today.  Without the TCP/IP we would probably take a lot more time trying to get the things done over any network.

After watching the video I felt that there has always been the desire for information flow at the stroke of a key.  I can only image what it must have been like when computers could only process one thing at a time.  The truth is that it probably was not cost effective to run such systems and those that were responsible for up keeping those systems must have pulled out a lot of hair.  There had to be some patience to work with such machines.  When the first networks began to take shape it must have been very time consuming to send and receive information.  There could not have been this expectation that there is now.  We push so much information through the internet now that it is hard to keep up with it.

I purchased my first computer back in 1998 when broadband was not really available.  I had a dial up system that would take a few minutes to connect to the internet and download speeds were horrific compared to today.  I will never forget to tones that I would hear when connecting to the internet.  Many hours were spent waiting for information to get downloaded but it was something that everyone was used to.  Uploading your information on to the internet took twice as much time. I have been fascinated through the years as the technology just continues to get better and faster.  One can only imagine these days what someone could do with such technology a couple of decades ago.

Time sharing was probably the result of all of the frustration that was taking place when dealing with these large and slow computers.  Having to manually input information from one computer to another had to be extremely exhausting, especially if we were to expect to transfer the amount of information that we transfer these days.  Thank you to the developers that figured out how to have one computer that can communicate to several others.  This was really the start of what we know today.

The Cold War really had an impact on everything that had to do with technology and I believe that if it was not for the Cold War we would not have many of the technologies that we have today.  There was an unannounced race to have the best technology in the world to stay on top.  This fueled many researchers and scientist to create and experiment to find answers on many different things especially technology.  Take a look back into our history and when do you see the most technology emerge?  Since the emergence of many technologies there has been a rapid rise to improve what has already been created.  Our technology continues to evolve and it continues to improve.  It will be interesting to see how far our technology will get.

The internet has made our lives connected to one another and it has simplified it in many different ways.  Many people rely on being connected all of the time and they can not imagine living their lives without being connected.  The internet has also put a lot of information at our finger tips.  There is an infinite amount of information that we can access as long as we are connected to the internet and we have the permission to access that information.  At this point in our history I do not believe that we will ever be able to go back to life without the internet. We will always have the desire to connect to the internet for some reason or another.  The internet has become part of who we are and it is probably best if we know more about its origins and how it works.

Introduction

As time passes us by, technology continues to advance and with the advancing technology comes new methods of doing things.  When I was in high school almost a couple of of decades ago we were exposed to the very first computers which are nothing compared to the computers that are available today.  Computers have become more compact and faster.  Computers can process more information and they have become part of our daily lives.  Almost every house hold in the United States has some type of device that connects them to the internet which gives them access to an infinite amount of information.  The following three things are the most popular devices to connect to the internet:

1. Computer
2. Cell Phone
3. Tablet

There are many other devices that have built-in network cards to give you the capability to connect to the internet.

Body

The following is the link to the article that I am discussing.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/?single_page=true

In the following paragraph Bush summarizes the complexity of what is to take place inside a computer and how the use of mechanical aids are able to help in the many different things that we do everyday.

But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings, cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human operator and thousands of times as fast—there are plenty of mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific records.

Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race.

I found this quote to be very interesting and I believe that it says a lot about what we are trying to do these days.  Science is the reason that we have the technology that we have today and as long as we continue to have scientists asking questions about the things around us then will we always have scientists discovering new things.

Bush looked into the future by discussing technologies that didn’t exist yet and how some day those technologies would help mankind in many different aspects.  I believe that if he were to take a look at how far we have come today he would say that what he sees is what he had envisioned a long time ago.

Hello everyone!!! So this is the first time that I have embarked in blogging.  This is something that has been around for quite some time and now, I will engage in blogging along with everyone in this class.  My name is David E. Ramirez and I am a junior.  I am a history major who will be graduating in 2013.  It is a great pleasure to meet everyone and I look forward to reading everything that everyone will write.

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