Kevin Pedersen - Technology

We are creating a fifth grade "yearbook."

Go Into Network/techlab.bolinas-stinson.org/Users/Yearbook/5th Grade and open your named folder, then Yearbook Page.doc

REVIEW - How to get pictures and put them into Word:

A network is collection of machines (or people) that  share resources. Computer networks are connections (usually made by wires or radio signals) that allow the computers to share files, printers and other resources. 

The Internet is a giant network that wraps around the world.

1969 - ARPANet Started by the US Department of Defense for research into networking. It is the original basis for what now forms the Internet. 

1969, April 7 - The first RFC (Request For Comment), RFC0001 published. RFCs are papers which are used to develop and define protocols for networking, originally the basis for ARPANet. There are now thousands of them applying to all aspects of the Internet. Collectively they document everything about the way the Internet and computers on it should behave, whether it's TCP/IP networking or how email headers should be written there will be a set of RFCs describing it.

1970 - The Internet was formed, although at the time it was a military network called ARPANet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). It was opened to non-military users later in the 1970s and many universities and large businesses went on-line. US Vice-president Al-Gore was the first to call it the Information superhighway.

1972 - The first international connections to ARPANet are established. ARPANet later became the basis for what we now call the Internet.

1980 - IBM hires Paul Allen and Bill Gates to create an operating system for a new PC. The pair buy the rights to a simple operating system manufactured by Seattle Computer Products and use it as a template. IBM allows the two to keep the marketing rights to the operating system, called DOS.

1981 - August 12th marks the birth of the IBM PC. The PC was significant because the hardware design was open. That is,  other manufacturers were able to build computers and components that would (usually) interoperate with each other. In addition, the software that ran on this open hardware was licensed from Microsoft to many manufacturers. The success of the IBM PC forced Apple and others to change their focus. Most companies whose computers were not based on the PC architecture went out of business or switched over to the PC architecture. The decision by IBM to open their architecture allowed endless companies to create computer hardware and software that was interoperable, sharing a common platform, now known simply as the "PC." By 2006, even Apple Computer had followed IBM's lead and adopted Intel CPUs and built Macs that can boot Microsoft Windows.

1982 - The TCP/IP Protocol established, and the "Internet" is formed as a connected set of networks using TCP/IP. The Commodore 64 begins to be sold with 64 kilobytes of random-access memory and containingMicrosoft BASIC and dropping in price from $600 to $200 allows it to become the best-selling computer to date (Note: My family owned one of these. - Kevin). In the same year, Apple Computer is the first personal computer manufacturer to hit the $1 billion mark for annual sales.

1984 - The now famous Apple commercial is shown during the Super Bowl, the commercial introduces the Apple Macintosh, a computer with graphical user interface instead of needing to type in commands. In six months sales of the computer reach 100,000 (Note: My family owned one of these, too. - Kevin).

 

1989 - World Wide Web is invented by Tim Berners-Lee, who saw the need for a global information exchange that would allow physicists to collaborate on research (he was working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland, at the time). The Web was a result of the integration of hypertext and the Internet. The hyperlinked pages not only provided information but provide transparent access to older Internet facilities such as ftp, telnet, Gopher, WAIS and USENET. He was awarded the Institute of Physics' 1997 Duddell Medal for this contribution to the advancement of knowledge. The Web started as a text-only interface, but NCSA Mosaic later presented a graphical interface (see 1993).

1993 -  A year in which web traffic over the Internet increased by 300,000%.

Commercial providers were allowed to sell Internet connections to individuals. Its use exploded, especially with the new interface provided by the World-Wide Web (see 1989) and NCSA Mosaic.

1995, December 28 – Internet censorship challenged: CompuServe blocks access to over 200 sexually explicit sites, partly to avoid confrontation with the German Government. Access to all but 5 was restored on Feb. 13 1996. 

1995, December - JavaScript development announced by Netscape.

1996, January - Netscape Navigator 2.0 released. Netscape 2.0 is the first browser to support JavaScript, a way to incorporate small programs into web pages. 

1998, June 25 - Microsoft released Windows 98. U.S. anti-trust authorities try to block its release since the new OS interlaces with other programs such as Internet Explorer and so effectively closes the market of such software to other companies. Specifically, Netscape no longer has any market because Internet Explorer is included with 90% of new computers sold.

2000-2001 – Microsoft loses its case with the US Department of Justice and is awaiting appeals. Open source software (e.g. Linux) becomes more popular, taking away market share that would have likely belonged to Microsoft Windows NT. Open source software is made possible by the existence of the online community.

1. (2 Parts) What was the original basis for the Internet called? Why was it started?

2. Which company and computer created the "universal platform" shared by nearly every computer manufacturer today, and when did this happen?

3. Using two sentences or more, describe what the WWW actually is, including who is credited with its invention.

4. Which company and computer introduced the graphical user interface, and when was it famously introduced?

5. When did Internet usage really “explode,” and why?

It's hard to wrap your mind around it, but digits don't have to be the numbers 0 (zero) through 9 (nine). The ten digits we have our minds wrapped around are decimal numbers, decimal meaning ten. Why do we use decimal numbers? Only because we have ten fingers (another name for finger is digit).

Since computers don't have fingers, but lights and switches (mostly teeny tiny switches called transistors), they count in a manner that is convenient for them. A switch (transistor) has only two "digits," 0 (zero) for off, and 1 (one) for on. Take a word that means "a system of two" (binary) and add it to the word "digit," and you get:

binary + digit = bit

A bit can only equal zero or one. A binary digit, or bit, is just a number, a digit with two possible values. So, if we count with bits instead of decimal digits, we count the same way, but skip all those other numbers (2 through 9). 

In the decimal number system, we count like this: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12... 

In the binary number system, we count the same way, but skip anything that has the numbers 2-9 in it, like this: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000.

Stop and think about it. Count to ten in binary.

Now let's talk about bytes. If you take eight bits (any combination of 1's and 0's) and string them together, we call it a byte. A byte is a string of 8 bits. A byte isn't a digit, but we use it like one because bits all alone don't tell us much. If you take eight bits (a byte), however, you can create 256 possible unique combinations of 1's and 0's. Long ago, a "code" was established for what these combinations could represent. That code uses the first bit for the computer to check for errors, and the other seven bits to represent letters, numbers and symbols like the dollar sign and such. The code is known as ASCII, which stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

The importance of the transistor in making modern technology possible cannot be overstated. Prior to transistors, electromechanical relays were used, with each relay representing a bit of information. 

Let's say that each relay is about the size of a sugar cube, with 1/2" sides. How much space would you need to store 1GB of memory using relays? Here's how we figure it out:

1	byte
8	there are 8 bits in each byte
1024	there are 1024 bytes in each kilobyte (1024 = 2^10)
1024	there are 1024 kilobytes in each megabyte
1024	there are 1024 megabytes in each gigabyte
1 x 8 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 8,589,934,592	there are 8,589,934,592 bits in each gigabyte
8,589,934,592	relays
2048 x 2048 x 2048 = 8,589,934,592	if you make a "gigabyte cube" of relays, there will be 2048 relays per side, with each relay measuring 1/2 inch per side
2048 relays x 1/2 inch / 12 inches per foot = 85.33 feet	a gigabyte of relays would take up the space of a cube measuring 85.33 feet per side

A gigabyte or relays would take up the space of an 8-story tall building, measuring 83 feet per side!!!

If it has a bill and webbed feet like a duck, lays eggs like a bird or reptile but also produces milk and has a coat of fur like a mammal, what could the genetics of the duck-billed platypus possibly be like? Well, just as peculiar — an amalgam of genes reflecting significant branching and transitions in evolution.

An international scientific team, which announced the first decoding of the platypus genome on Wednesday, said the findings provided “many clues to the function and evolution of all mammalian genomes,” including that of humans, and should “inspire rapid advances in other investigations of mammalian biology and evolution.”

The research is described in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature by a group of almost 100 scientists led by Wesley C. Warren, a geneticist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The single subject of the study was a female platypus named Glennie, a resident of Glenrock Station in New South Wales, Australia, whose DNA was collected and analyzed.

The platypus, native to Australia, is so odd that when the first specimens were sent to Europe in the 19th century, scientists suspected a hoax. It was classified as a mammal, one of only two monotremes (echidna is the other) living today that are offshoots of the main mammalian lineage. The divergence occurred some 166 million years ago from primitive ancestors combining features of both mammals and reptiles.

“What is unique about the platypus is that it has retained a large overlap between two very different classifications, while later mammals lost the features of reptiles,” Dr. Warren said in an interview.

In their investigation of the platypus genetic blueprint, the scientists found that its genome contains about 18,500 genes, similar to other vertebrates and about two-thirds the size of the human genome. The platypus shares 82 percent of its genes with the human, mouse, dog, opossum and chicken. Some repeated elements in the genome, the scientists noted, hold hints as to the chronology of changes in the platypus.

Of particular interest, the researchers reported, the analysis identified families of genes that link the platypus to reptiles (like those for egg-laying, vision and venom production), as well as to mammals (antibacterial proteins and lactation). The platypus lacks nipples; the young nurse through the abdominal skin.

One surprise was finding genes responsible for sensitive odor receptors. As a primarily aquatic animal, the platypus was already known to rely on electrosensory receptors in its bill to detect faint electric fields emitted by underwater prey. So why the considerable ability to sense odors? The scientists speculate that it may involve sexual communication or the use of water-soluble odorants in navigating and hunting underwater.

Richard K. Wilson, director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University, said that the comparison of the platypus genes to those of other mammals was the beginning of an examination of how “genes have been conserved throughout evolution.”

The project, involving scientists from eight countries, was primarily financed by the National Human Genome Research Institute in the United States. Its director, Francis S. Collins, said, “As weird as this animal looks, its genome sequence is priceless for understanding how mammalian biological processes evolved.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

We redressed cyber safety and the appropriate use of school blogs and social networking websites such as MySpace and FaceBook, discussing the risks associated with posting content that might be offensive to others who might look you up on the Internet (e.g. schools, employers, etc.).

We then went through the students' blogs and cleared out any potentially offensive or risky content.

Lastly, we went back over some core computer vocabulary:

We began the TUHSD spreadsheet test on 4/28.

We will begin today at step 7.

We got up to step 13.

Today we presented more student work. Through the course of the presentations, we took the opportunity to go over how to properly name/rename files with descriptive names (e.g. "Mythological Creatures.ppt," not "Presentation3.ppt"). We also reviewed how and when to capitalize letters:

• Sentence case.
• UPPERCASE
• lowercase
• Title Case

One student finished the Cassini project and the rest are still working on it.

4th Graders: Please read directions below.