CMSC 150 - Fall 2017 - The Pioneers of Computer Science

Description of Topic When you logged onto your computer today did you think about what web browser you wanted to use? You probably are using one of the major browsers that exist today, like Google Chrome, Mozilla FireFox, or Safari. However, these browsers were not always the major popular browsers. Back in the early 90s, the internet was dominated by a web browser named Mosaic. Mosaic was not the first web browser to be created, but it was the first to become widely used, and Mosaic's success is one of the largest reasons that the internet became so popular. (2) Mosaic was created by an internet pioneer named Marc Andreessen. Andreessen was born in Iowa in 1971, and chose to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for his undergraduate studies. While at the University of Illinois, Andreessen started working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a government funded entity associated with the University that aims to develop computer infr...

Description of Topic In the mid 1900s, a lot of the basic computing technology that we are familiar with today had already been developed at its most basic form. Computers existed and their abilities expanded human computational power, but there still was no way to bring this computing power to the general public or a way for computer scientists to easily work collaboratively. Then came Leonard Kleinrock, who, along with fellow computer scientists Donald Davies and Paul Baran, came up with packet switched networks, the foundation for what we now know as the Internet.  Kleinrock's life is a true story of perseverance and the American dream, as he was born to a poor family of Ukrainian immigrants. Not able to afford to go to college, Kleinrock lobbied for scholarships from every town government he could reach before finally getting the opportunity to take night classes at New York City College where he excelled so much that upon his graduation, he was able to get into MIT in o...

Description of Topic In my first post, I proclaimed Charles Babbage "The Father of COMPUTING." However, holding this title does not also make Babbage the Father of the COMPUTER. Babbage was the first person to create a design for a machine that could engage in some form of computing, but this was not an actual computer, merely an ancestor of what we consider a computer to be today. The first man to complete a fully functional program controlled computer was a man named Konrad Zuse. While some consider Alan Turing to be the true father of the computer  ¹ , Zuse was the first one to actually create a programmable computer in 1938, so for this blog I will be considering him the Father of The Computer and not Turing.  Zuse's original computer, called the "Z1" was created over the span of two years from 1936 to 1938 in Zuse's parents living room. It was electro-mechanical, meaning that it was a mechanical device (like Babbage's difference engine) that ...