Research

The History of Graphics can be traced all the way back to prehistoric man. However, this article is aimed at providing an informative and comprehensive history of the computer graphic, CGI or Computer Graphic Imagery and Graphic Animation. Computers have been used to various degrees to transfer information since the 1940s. However, it was not until the 1980s that computers were used in a consolidated manner that allowed for fully interactive communications in what we now know as the World Wide Web.

As time marches on, it becomes more and more difficult to recall our world before the invention of the computer. For those who tire over answering an infinite number of daily emails, imagining this world may seem like a pleasant dream. But for the rest of modern society, this is probably not something we'd like to imagine. Whether you are a technophile, or someone who simply requires a computer for your day-to-day activities, you've probably wondered at least once who is responsible for the modern computer.

Microsoft and Apple have both, defined the world of computers in the past couple of decades. Both, were new start-ups and when compared to IBM, no one gave much of a chance to either company. The two companies not only have managed to race ahead of any other tech companies over the years but have been locked in a battle of sorts against each other, over the past 20 odd years.

Laptop computer history is a rich and intriguing subject. While not every technological advance made it to today's laptops, the history of laptop computers is full of great ideas and discarded efforts that created the machines we know and love.

First, second, third, fourth, fifth generation. Vaccum Tubes. Transistors. Integrated circuits. Microprocessors. Artificial Inteligence.

A computer language is the means by which instructions and data are transmitted to computers. Put another way, computer languages are the interface between a computer and a human being. There are various computer languages, each with differing complexities. For example, the information that is understandable to a computer is expressed as zeros and ones (i.e., binary language). However, binary language is incomprehensible to humans. Computer scientists find it far more efficient to communicate with computers in a higher level language.

During the 60s, while computers were still in an early stage of development, many new programming languages appeared. Among them, ALGOL 60, was developed as an alternative to FORTRAN but taking from it some concepts of structured programming which would later inspire most procedural languages, such as CPL and its succesors (like C++). ALGOL 68 also directly influenced the development of data types in C. Nevertheless ALGOL was an non-specific language and its abstraction made it impractical to solve most commercial tasks.

A short essay about the origins of the C programming language and why it became so popular so quickly. The C programming language and its direct descendants are by far the most popular programming languages used in the world today. Most competent programmers know how to use C, and usually C is a programmer's language of choice. This structurally tiny language originated at Bell Labs in order to write the first Unix operating system for a DEC PDP-7 computer with only 8K bytes of memory. In spite of its small beginnings, C has scaled up to run on powerful super-computers with gigabytes of memory. The language is extremely portable; it is possible to write a program in C for just about every platform in existence. Yet, if one takes a more in depth look at C, one realizes that it is rather weak and has an extremely small vocabulary. How did C become so popular despite its deficiencies? This paper will explore the history of the C programming language and discuss the different aspects of the language in an attempt to determine why this language has thrived in spite of there being more powerful and better structured object oriented languages in existence. Portions of this paper get a little technical, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to teach the reader all the intricacies of C; however, the reader unfamiliar with C will still be able to follow the arguments, and thus come away with an understanding of how C was born and why it is so popular.

Computers are only as good as the programs they run. Programming languages are used by computer programmers to write specific sets of instructions for the computers microprocessor to read in order to complete a specific task.

Machine Language This is in fact the only language that a computer (or beter said a processor) understands and can execute (directly into the hardware). Machine language exists solely out of the binary symbols 0 and 1 and is thus inappropriate for use by humans. Every computer program written in any programming language must be converted to machine language by either a compiler or an interpreter. Furthermore, machine language depends on the processor and is thus not portable in any way.