American Technology :: Computers

American Technology In 1957 the USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In response, the United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military. In 1962 RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation, was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack. In 1968 ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits. In today’s society the Internet has greatly reduced the number of sent letters through the US postal service. This is true because if you can send the same information to somebody without wasting paper it is much better on the environment. Another reason why so many people have switched to using e-mail is that it is just simply faster than waiting for a letter in the mail. One more reason people use e-mail more is that the rate of postage to send a letter is steadily going up. It is currently at 37 cents per letter where sending e-mail is free. Some of the negative effects of this shift of people using e-mail over actually mailing their letters is the postage per letter is increasing more often than ever because more people use the internet to send letters now because it is just faster than mailing a letter which could take up to a week to get to your house where e-mail is instantaneous. The Internet’s impact on me personally is good overall. This is true because I surf the Internet when I’m bored, the Internet has online games that I can play with other people on the other side of the world if I wanted to. The Internet has all kinds of databases, which helps me on research papers like this one.