Blog 5

Tutorial Task: Wikipedia

Article 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biloela

This article on my home town ‘Biloela’, is surprisingly accurate. It highlights the geographical location of the town, the industry which the town thrives on, local facilities and other interesting aspects of the town. It covers all basic facts which a reader would need to understand the topic. The article is a little biased, as it kind of sounds like a article you would find in a travel brochure promoting the town. In my opinion, Biloela is not that great of a town. I was born and bred there and couldn’t wait for the day I moved to the Gold Coast. But that is my opinion. Maybe to improve the article I would write from a local’s perspective what it was like growing up in the town. This would give a little more of an insight to what it’s like to live there, not just as a tourist destination.


Article 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optus

This article on Optus only covers the very basic facts about the company. From what I know from working for the company the article is accurate. It highlights the important aspects of the company which would be a useful start to someone who is researching Optus. The article is very balanced and fair as it only states the very fundamental facts about the company. No biased opinion is prominent in the article. I would not make any changes to this article as I believe it does not need any more information. A researcher can go to the Official Optus webpage for further information.


Lecture Notes:


Birth of the Computer
Charles Babbage created the first Mechanical computer; he sketched out the logical structure of the modern computer.

Computers were first commercially produced by IBM in the 1950s. The first generation of computers were large, unwieldy and expensive machines for military, government and corporate work but it quickly became apparent that computers would get smaller, quicker and less expensive at an exponential rate

Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC is known for making the personal computers of today possible and approachable by the general user. In the early 70’s they developed concepts such as the mouse, the graphical ser interface (GUI) and pull down menus.

Apple
Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
They produced the Apple I - a primitive machine with a single circuit board, no case and no keyboard. It sold for $USA666.60

PC/Microsoft
Bill Gates wrote a language called BASIC for the Altair, so that it could be used for simple applications like word processing, basic accounting and some games. In order to market his program he started a little company in his garage - Microsoft. By the end of 1975 more companies had joined the PC industry.

The internet
The internet is a network of networks, which is often called ‘Internetwork’. It uses servers to run everything. There are only seven serves in the world which controls all the information.

World Wide Web
It is important to understand that the internet is not the same thing as the web.
The web is an application of the Internet which began in the 1990’s. The Web includes all the internet sites that people have made available on servers around the world. The web is just one part of the broader internet which includes many other things as well as the Web

Cyberspace
A conceptual space where words, relationships, data, wealth and power are manifested by people using Computer Mediated Communication technologies.

Some early Internet Applications:

• Electronic mail (Email)
  Email is a virtual mail system which sends documents from one sender to either one or multiple receivers.
  
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
  File Transfer Protocol is a system which allows you to directly download (or upload) files from another computer onto your computer with minimal requirements for compatibility.
  
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
  IRC is a real time chat system that was particularly popular in the 1990s as it was one of the first applications that allowed people to type to each other in real time. This is what is known as a “Synchronous” medium of communication.
  
• MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, etc.
  These are all variants on the same kind of program usually referred to as MUDs (which originally stood for Multiple User Dungeon because it was based on Dungeons and Dragons. These were the first of the internet massive multiuser online role playing games. Rather than being graphics-based, MUDs are text only.

More Recent Internet Applications:

• Instant Messaging (IM)
• Peer-to-Peer (p2p) file sharing
• Portable Audio (MP3s, AAC, FLAC, OGG, etc) and Podcasting
• VoIP and Voice chat