In 1736 a young boy was born to Scottish parents in the north of the British Isles.  From the beginning this merchant's son showed a marked interest in science.  In 1763 this boy, now a man helped to launch the greatest period of innovation ever seen.  After being sent a malfunctioning model James Watt, a mathematical instrument maker, created a cheaper and more powerful steam engine.  Within a short interval of time locomotives powered by Watt's design would haul tons of freight across continents.  A new branch of chemistry was created to try to improve Watt's design, and they did. Soon the technology spread and, as education improved the common man was able of have the very best that technology had to offer.  Hundreds of miles of steel rails linked one end of the continent to the other, steam power created factories, the machine now ruled the world for better or for worse.

          Enter a man named Charles Babbage; he imagined and devised a machine, powered by steam, that would be able to perform complicated arithmetic, the machine however, was not built he could not achieve a fine enough tolerance or enough funding.  The machine, called an analytical engine, is not as important as the principles that Babbage used to operate his fictional machine.  These principles would lay in wait for some time.  Many years later behind the front during W.W.II, a British listening post and spy station, Station X, was trying to decode encrypted German messages for British intelligence.  The first man to tackle this problem was Alan Turing and he devised a

machine to decode the "Enigma" code with an approach similar to Babbage's.  A machine was built and messages began to be decoded.  Soon after the Germans upped the ante and created a more complex code.  The next man to step forward would help change the world; using Babbage's approach, a little ingenuity, and pure genius he would cave countless lives and win the war.  A young man from oxford designed a machine that had no moving parts; this "Solid State" Technology used thousands of transistors connected in many different combinations to decode the German messages.  The world's first computer was created to gather information on German troop movements and better aid the allies to defeat them.  Soon the machine was decoding messages, often faster than the intended recipients could.  This was the first time that technology and information was so linked and it has remained that way ever since.

          Since the day that IBM released their first PC the world of computers and the world of information have been inexplicably linked.  In the late 1960's Scientists and military engineers wished to correspond, trade information, and pass theories around, ArpaNET and MilNET were born.  Today the ArpaNET

standard now called Ethernet allows the general pubic access to the worlds largest information exchange and storage program.  The Internet was born.  Today, Trillions upon Trillions upon Trillions of bytes occupy the space known as the Internet, free to all

of those who are savvy enough to retrieve it.  You can find information on any topic form dog grooming to theoretical physics, a virtual sea of knowledge exists and one must now wade through it and try to fish out what is relevant.  How this transition took place, how the information revolution began and how technology facilitated its arrival, will be discussed and compared with the transformation that occurred in the 1800's with the industrial Revolution.  Many parallels will be drawn and the connections that link the steam engine to the international space station will be revealed, in doing so the ultimate fate of the information age will be presented.

This Way to World's the First Computer...