What is the history of dark ages of computer?

Answer 1

As the need for rapid calculations increased, commercial organizations introduced the electronic calculator to the market. Then the computer appeared.

The price of computers decreased, and they started appearing in more businesses, and then also in schools, libraries, and wealthier governments.

The internet connected computers together and provided more information to users, but there were also problems such as fraudulent websites, overabundant commercial emails, copyright violations, server outages, and lack of connectivity to poorer countries.

The dawn of the computer age brought about some disadvantages, such as incompatible file formats, fears about privacy, and error messages such as the Blue Screen of Death.

There are some websites to help at the links below.

Answer 2

1st Answer:

The computer wasn't invented until 1947 many hundreds of years after the Middle Ages/ Dark Ages. So, there wasn't one.

2nd Answer:

The term Dark Ages is applied to many other things besides the Middle Ages of Europe. It refers to times when literacy declines, history is not recorded, information is not available, or innovation ceases.

I have seen two uses of Dark Ages relating to computers. One was a prediction by Steve Jobs, made sometime around 1983, that if the IBM products became too dominant, there would be a period of about 20 years in which innovation would cease because IBM was not interested in innovation so much as selling existing products.

I think this has arguably happened. My first exposure to a computer, in 1966, was to a machine that cost two million dollars, occupied what had been a faculty apartment, and required three air conditioners. It also had 8 kilobytes of RAM, no keyboard for input, no monitor for output, and operated entirely on punch cards and a strike-on printer. Sixteen years later, I had a PC with a hard drive, and it did nearly everything I could want it to do. Now, twenty eight years after that, I still have a PC with a hard drive. Admittedly, it can acquire lots of pictures form the Internet (nearly all being ads), but the expense of the operating system that can do that is the introduction of viruses, and the overhead it uses to deal with them makes the new computer seem slower than the old at times. So the history of the Digital Dark Ages is a history of things not happening much, a lack of innovation and meaningful change.

I think this is an age that might be coming to an end with smart phones, which are bringing in a new wave of innovation. We have yet to see where that goes, however. And even that is not the sort of innovation many people envisioned in 1981. What we would have meant by a smart phone we would have expected in the future, would have been a machine that was intelligent to the point of talking with a human, and progress on that front has been glacially slow.

The other meaning of the Dark Ages of Computers has to do with digital memory. Floppy disks, hard drives, and even CDs all lose their memory with time. A CD ROM is only good for about ten years. Data that has been stored is lost, and much of our digital past is disappearing. Articles on this sometimes compare this with newspapers of the late 19th and 20th centuries, which were made with paper so heavily bleached that it contained all the chemicals needed to make it decompose, and so is lost. The result is that unless great care is made to preserve things, they disappear, as learning presumably did in the dark ages. While I have to agree, data is lost, I am not sure what the societal implications of this one are.

Answer 3

This question is a bit ambiguous, and it is difficult to know whether the intent is to ask how computing was done in the Middle Ages, or what the history was of a period called the Computer Dark Ages. There is a link below to a related question on the later.

Medieval computing was done with a very simple calculating tool called an abacus, which survived from ancient times. When Arabic numerals were introduced at the beginning of the 13th century, calculating was done more and more in written form, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there was an audit trace, so a person could go back and double check each step later, and the fact that more complicated calculations could be done than was possible on an abacus. There is a link below to an article on the abacus.