A new era was born. The ways of the old were gone. No one knew when it happened, all they knew is that it did. During this time of wonderment a new world was born, a world of awesome machinery. People didn%t rule this world, (and some even thought that they didn't rule there own), the machines did. They had their own language, binary, little 1%s and 0%s, on's and off's. The machines were called computers. People thought that they could control them but they couldn%t, for the computers where smarter, faster then they could ever hope to be.

    Back in the 1600's the ideas for the first computers were conceived. They were simple mechanical calculating machines composed of gears and cranks. In the 1830's an English mathematician by the name of Charles Baggage developed the idea for a mechanical digital computer, he called it an analytical engine. The machine contained the basic elements of and automatic computer and was designed to do complicated calculations according to a basic sequence of instructions. Unfortunately, the technology of the time was not advanced enough to provide the precision parts needed to make the "engine" work. In 1930 Vannevar Bush build the worlds first reliable analog computer. He build his machine, the differential analyzer, to solve differential equations.

    In 1939 John Atanasoff built the first semielectronic digital computing device. Howard Aiken build a similar machine in 1944, hecalled it the Mark I. This machine was controlled mostly by mechanical relays (switching devices). At the University of Pennsylvania, two engineers, J. Presper Ecket, Jr. and John Mauchly, built the first fully electronic digital computer (or EDC). They called it ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer). Instead of relays, vacuum tubes did the computing operations of the machine. ENIAC worked about 1,000 times faster then the MARK I and could perform approximately 5,000 arithmetic operations per second.

    The next step up in computing was a computer called EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). This computer was the first stored-program digital computer. The stored-program idea that was use in EDVAC was conceived by a man named John Von Neumann. Von Neumann proposed that programs could be coded as numbers and stored with data in a computer memory. This idea led to the creation of EDVAC.

    In 1951, the builders of ENIAC developed a more advanced EDC called UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer). With in a few years, UNIVAC I was massed-produced and became the first commercially available computer. Unlike the earlier computers the UNIVAC I could handle both numbers and letters equally. Like other computers, the UNIVAC I used vacuum tubes to control arithmetic and memory-switching functions. Machines that used vacuum tubes are often called "first generation" computers.

    The invention of the transistor in 1947 and of related solid-state devices during the 1950's and 1960's resulted in the production of faster and more reliable electronic computers.

    Next step up was a machine that could read cards that had holes punched into them. Now all they had to be done was feed in a stack of cards that had the instructions for a program on them and the computer would run it and give the result faster then any human. But this wasn%t efficient enough, there could be hundreds of cards for each program. And each computer could have hundreds of program to be run. The machine that ran the programs were also non-efficient. They were made with vacuum tubes, which were heavy and bulky, and got extremely hot. Over the years the transistor was born. It did the same job as one hundred vacuum tubes in space an inch or less. Next came the Integrated Circuit (or IC). It to could do the same as thousands or millions of transistors in only a square inch or two. Finally someone perfected a better way to store information, magnetic storage. The first form of magnetic was magnetic tape. The same amount of information on a thousand punch cards could be stored on one reel of tape. After a while this too proved to be inefficient. The tape wore out or it would brake. Next a magnetic disk (or floppy disk) was created which lasted longer and would never brake like a reel of tape. The floppy measured about 12 inches across and could store about 120 kilobytes of information. Over the years men were able to reduce the size to 3 1/4 inches and increase the capacity to 1.44 megabytes. Yet again this proved not up to par. An idea started in the music and video industry (which were still using magnetic tape) that you could use light to read and write on to a reflective surface. They where successful. The sound and visual quality was stunning, it almost felt as if you were right there. The light disk was called a Compact Disk (or CD) in the music industry andthe Laser Disk in the movie industry. As these disks became more widely used, the %computer industry% got smart and started developing what was called the CD-ROM, which was the same size as the CD and could store almost 600 time that of the 3 1/4% floppy disk. The CD-ROM was great but you could only write to it once. People saw this problem and started work on what was called an Optical Disk. This was a great invention, it worked on the same principals as the CD-ROM but you could write to it as many times as you wanted. But as usual programs got bigger and bigger, and people got hungrier and hungrier for space. Their had always be an idea about reading and writing information on a 3D object (up to this point all data had been written on flat surfaces); one year in part the United Arabian Confederacy, in what used to be called Israel, at the University of Jerusalem, they finally perfected the process. They made syntectic crystals that had microscopic pores in it. These pores stretched the surface area from a few square inches to a few square miles. That is where we are today. The computer of today is called, by most, a Cyberdeck, With this they can access what they thought was a new universe, Cyberspace. The denizens of this place live in what is called the Matrix.