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| Travelogue of Communication | | (Physical Transportation to Electronic Technology) | | Jamwal Mahadeep Singh
The history of communication began with the use of smoke signals and drum beating in Africa, the America and parts of Asia. In early history information could be exchanged only by physical transportation of messages. Communication systems using electrical and electronic technology have a significant impact on modern society. Experiments on communication with electricity, initially started in about 1726. Samuel Morse is credited for developing a version of the electrical telegraph message through telegraph cable, which he demonstrated on 2 September 1837, over three miles on 6 January 1838, and eventually over forty miles between Washington, DC and Baltimore on 24 May 1844 ultimately on 27 July 1866, with the completion of laying of transatlantic telegraph cable, the transatlantic communication for the first time was established.
The telephone was the first device in history that enabled people to talk directly with each other across large distances. The earliest mechanical telephones were based on sound transmission through pipes or other physical media. It was only on 10 March 1876, when Bell transmitted the sentence: "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!" using a liquid transmitter and an electromagnetic receiver. The earliest telephones had only one wire for both transmitting and receiving of audio, and used a ground return path, as was found in telegraph systems. The modern telephone is the result of work of many people Alexander Graham Bell was, however, the first to patent the telephone in 1876, as an apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telephonically. It was in 1935 that first telephone call around the world was made. The first handheld portable telephone came into existence in 1973. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, which provides access to the public switched telephone network. Modern mobile telephone services use cellular network architecture, and, therefore, mobile telephones are called cellular telephones or cell phones. 2000s-era mobile phones support a variety of other services, such as text messaging, MMS, email, Internet access, short-range wireless communications (infrared, Bluetooth), business applications, video games, and digital photography. Mobile phones offering only those capabilities are known as feature phones; mobile phones which offer greatly advanced computing capabilities are referred to as smart phones.
Over several years starting in 1894, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi worked on adapting the newly discovered phenomenon of radio waves to telecommunication, building the first wireless telegraphy system using them. In December 1901, he established wireless communication between St. John's, Newfoundland and Poldhu, Cornwall (England), earning him a Nobel Prize in Physics (which he shared with Karl Braun) in 1909. In 1900 Reginald Fessenden was able to wirelessly transmit a human voice.
The computer was born not for entertainment or email but out of a need to solve a serious number-crunching crisis. One of the earliest machines designed to assist people in calculations was the 'abacus' which is still being used some 5000 years after its invention. The computer as we know it today is credited to English mechanical engineer and polymath professor Charles Babbage, considered as the "father of the computer", who conceptualized programmable computer and invented the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century.
The internet began life in 1969, when scientists working for the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now known as DARPA) connected computer networks at the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute. The technology continued to grow in the 1970s and scientist Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), a communications model that set standards for how data could be transmitted between multiple networks and from there researchers began to assemble the "network of networks" that became the modern Internet. Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the Internet has no single "inventor." The Internet was the work of dozens of pioneering scientists, programmers and engineers who each developed new features and technologies that eventually merged to become the "information superhighway". The online world then took on a more recognizable form, when computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (W.W.W) and served on the open internet at the end of 1990. The web is actually just the most common means of accessing data online in the form of websites and hyperlinks. The web helped popularize the Internet among the public, and served as a crucial step in developing the vast trove of information that most of us now access on a daily basis.
A web site that collects and organizes content from all over the internet is termed as 'Web Search Engine' that is a software system designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Those wishing to locate something would enter a query about what they'd like to find and the web search engine provides links to content that matches what they want. There are number of search engines that are most popular in the world and serve millions of search queries per day such as:
n Google that hold first place in search. According to the latest net market share report published in November 2018, 73% of searches were powered by Google.
n Bing is Microsoft's attempt to challenge Google in the area of search. Their search engine market share is somewhere 10%, even though Bing is the default search engine on Windows PCs.
n Yahoo is one the most popular email providers and holds the fourth place in search with 3.90% market share. From October 2011 to October 2015, Yahoo search was powered exclusively by Bing. Since October 2015 Yahoo agreed with Google to provide search-related services and since then the results of Yahoo are powered both by Google and Bing. Yahoo is also the default search engine for Firefox browsers in the United States (since 2014).
n Ask.com is based on a question/answer format where most questions are answered by other users or are in the form of polls.
n Baidu is the most popular search engine in China. Baidu is serving billion of search queries per month.
n AOL.com is an old time search engine but still find place in top ten search engines. The AOL network includes many popular web sites like engadget.com, techchrunch.com and the huffingtonpost.com. Now it stand acquired by Verizon Communications since 2015..
n Wolframalpha is different that all the other search engines. They market it as a Computational Knowledge Engine which can give you facts and data for a number of topics. It can do all sorts of calculations, for example if you enter "mortgage 2000" as input, it will calculate your loan amount, interest paid etc. based on a number of assumptions.
n Archive.org is the internet archive search engine. One can use it to find out how a web site looked since 1996. It is very useful tool if you want to trace the history of a domain and examine how it has changed over the years.
Search engines enable us to find any answer to any question within seconds. Many of these search engines are one-stop shops for information. Not only can we search for current affairs with up-to-date information, we can also find out about entertainment, fashion, sports, and what is popularly trending on the internet. |
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