A Brief History Of Rose-Hulman

A Brief History Of Rose-Hulman
[ Information Age ] -- Page 6

The breakthroughs in productivity came from, among other things, the savings in human labor brought by the accessibility to more and more people of the capacity to process heretofore unfeasible quantities of information. This, beginning in the mid-1980's was doubling every eighteen months (Moore's Law). In 1974, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology had a mainframe computer but the mechanical slide rule was the basic engineering tool used by students, both in classes and after graduation. Just twelve years later, by 1986, every faculty member had a desktop computer, which cost approximately $5,000 apiece. By 1998, for almost half this cost, each student had his or her own notebook-sized "personal" computer that was a thousand times faster than 1986 desktop computers in their operation, and the amount of data it could store was measured in tens of millions, instead of hundreds of thousands of bytes. The student could carry his or her "notebook" to class; plug it into a network; and use it to do mathematical computations, construct charts, or--by clicking a handheld device called a "mouse"-- manipulate an electronic pointer on the flip-up video monitor to communicate with fellow classmates, the professor, with anyone anywhere on earth who was similarly equipped. The latter was possible because of the Internet--the on-line computer communication system of the national defense research community (a vestige of the Cold War)--now, beginning in the late 1980's, open to the public for private, educational, and commercial uses. Twenty years earlier, the world had been connected by radio, telephone, and television.

Now, individuals and institutions around the globe were in contact twenty-four hours a day via electronic mail. Indeed, anyone, such as a Rose-Hulman student, with access to a computer equipped with a modem (to connect the computer to a telephone wire) could send and receive color video and stereophonic sound as well as written messages. They could have a site, called a "home page" on the Internet's so-called Worldwide Web; or even without a site of their own, they could buy or sell things, exchange ideas, arrange travel, communicate with friends, gamble, play games, manage money, print and distribute articles and books, or, for example, retrieve historical documents from the National Archives in Washington, D.C. for a history course. Efficient, open, democratic, global markets could now exist for any idea, commodity, or device. Electro- magnetic (radio-wave) communication via a system of low, earth-orbiting communications satellites in space soon would enable individuals anywhere on earth to talk with one another (or even to send video) using wireless, hand-held (cellular) telephones or wallet-sized computers. NEXT PAGE