Since the early days of DOS, kids have been playing fun yet educational games on their home PCs. This was the start of computers being used for educational purposes on home PCs. Today you can buy a whole course on a CD or attend school over the internet in so-called Web “Academies”. This has greatly improved the ease of home schooling. With computers, it was much easier to teach yourself. Since the rise of common computer usage, we have created new fields of study. One of these studies is A.I., not the movie with Haley Joel Osment, Artificial Intelligence.
Computers have now entered our classrooms. If you use a calculator, your using a computer. Students now use programs like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The most latter of those being used to graph difficult functions. This save much time in the classroom allowing us to learn more and do our work more efficiently. The use of computers has allowed new and small companies to offer more than they ever have before. Plenty of people will know of your business if you create a website. These companies have been gaining many more customers with the progress of IT. In most stores today, you can go in and look at a digital catalog of their products, well, the ones that are making big bucks at least. They can do all of their records digitally and save them on to Floppy Disks or CD-R/RWs. If they need to find a product in their inventory, they are a type and click away from having their search processed in the time it takes to blink. They can check the sale of a product from years ago, if they ever have bad taxes and get a severe audit. In the same way, people at home can just run one of the Quicken programs or other Tax programs to log their tax records. Something that used to require careful record keeping and consumed much of our time can now be done quickly on computers. There’s no real need to go down to the local H&R Block and have tax expert manage your taxes when you have one in your spare room. People can even pay their bills online now. A big change in society is that many people now relate their entire lives to computers. These people withdraw from the social world. For some of them, their whole life can be accessed on their hard drive.
We shall now venture onto the “darkside” of this matter. The rise of common computers usage has created the class of hackers. It is on its own a culture. Most movies dramatize this culture. They make everything a little over the top. Although many of the activities they show are probably possible, they will never occur. Such as the movie “Swordfish”, or even the movies I stated earlier “Hackers” and “Wargames”. overdo this sub culture…when it comes to online activities, there is a major difference. Major movies like Hackers or Swordfish revolve around hackers. I myself know some people that hack, yet they do not hack sites or anything. All they do is hack each others computers creating what they call a “war game.” They then follow their own set of rules and have someone to enforce those rules. This takes the evil act of hacking and makes it a game to see if one can do it or not. Kevin Mitnick was the type person that did not hack for money or anything, yet did hack for the reason “I just got to know.” Too bad for him Tsutomu Shimomura was able to track him down. While some people think that hacking is only about the internet, it is not. There is something called cracking and that can be either internet or software based. People will crack programs either for their own need or to help others (at least in their mind). Sometimes they crack programs just so they can see the code to satisfy their own curiosity.
While computers have had a large impact on society, the internet has had a global impact. Bringing people together solve problems or to make money. All of this though is based on computers so still acts upon the already altered society. Thanks to computers, society will never be the same.
