Week 2 Obsolete technologies 




  As we know a massive amount of new technologies were developed in the 20th century. People made many inventions in different fields, including internet. But today, many of them are forgotten and replaced by newer technologies. However, some were developed and are still used by many people

PDA
A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC is a portable computing device with broad functionality. The PDA is often called a "palmtop" because of its small size. Initially, PDAs were intended for use as electronic organizers. It is impossible to make calls from a “classic” PDA, and a PDA is not a mobile phone, therefore, by now, classic PDAs are almost completely replaced by communicators - PDAs with a cellular communication module and smartphones.The first PDA, the Organiser, was released in 1984 by Psion, followed by Psion's Series 3, in 1991. The latter began to resemble the more familiar PDA style, including a full keyboard.
Картинки по запросу "old pda"
Functionality of PDA: 
  • Books reading
  • Diary and schedule
  • All kinds of records: memos, contact information, lists, databases.
  • Sound player
  • Dictaphone
  • Handwritten notes
  • Viewing images, videos, films
  • Internet access
  • Maps
  • Games

The most common operating systems pre-installed on PDAs are:

Other, rarely used operating systems:

  • EPOC, then Symbian OS (in mobile phone + PDA combos)
  • Linux (e.g. VR3, IPAQ, Sharp Zaurus PDA, Opie, GPE, Familiar Linu] etc.)
  • Newton
  • QNX (also on iPAQ)


CONNECTING TO THE INTERNET VIA TELEPHONE LINE
Dial-up is a service that allows a computer to connect to another computer (access server) to initiate a data transfer session (for example, for access to the Internet) using a modem and a public telephone network. Typically, dial-up refers only to Internet access on a home computer or dial-up access to a corporate network using point-to-point PPP (theoretically, you can also use the outdated SLIP protocol).
Starting from 2000, broadband Internet access using DSL technology has replaced modem access in many parts of the world. Broadband typically offers speeds of 64 kbps and up for a fraction of the cost of dialup. The ever-increasing volume of content in areas such as video, entertainment portals, media, etc., no longer allows sites to operate on dialup modems. However, in many areas, dial-up access is still in demand, namely where high speed is not required. This is partly due to the fact that in some regions the laying of broadband networks is economically unprofitable or, for one reason or another, is impossible.

Surprisingly, even with high-speed internet available across the country, an impressive number of people still connect to the internet via telephone lines. But a survey by the Pew Research Internet Project found that 2% of Americans still use this kind of Internet. This is about 5 million people who use a modem, and the majority of them lives  in rural areas.
Another explanation is that many people who use such a service do not even realize how useless it is. About 75% of users also have broadband, but they don't know that if they disconnect from the phone line, they will still have an access to the Internet. Such a connection brings companies about 80% of the profits, which is very suspicious.
Картинки по запросу "dial up"

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-up_Internet_access
https://interestingengineering.com/10-obsolete-technologies




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 Week 14 - The Blind Programmer Tommy McWilliam, Mobile Engineer at Quora told a story about one his of his best friends in high school, who was diagnosed with Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy when he was in his senior year. NONL constantly reduced his eyesight and in his first year of college, he was almost completely blind. He majored in computer science, and the way he programmed was one of the most unusual.  In college, he used a combination of magnifier and narrator. The screen magnifier was called MAGic and allowed him to enlarge the text so that only a few characters could fit on the monitor. The monitor itself was a huge screen over 30 inches, optimized for the visually impaired.He always set Narrator to its maximum reading speed (probably over 300 wpm). By comparison, audiobooks tend to sound twice as slow. His friend also preferred to use the absurdly old version of Firefox (3.5 or something) because it supported his screen reader the best. He performed almost all acti
Read more
                                Week 6      Copyleft Copyleft grants the right to freely distribute and modify intellectual property with the requirement to keep the same rights in derivative works created on the basis of that property.  Copyleft also helps programmers who want to make improvements to free software to get permission to do so. Copyleft is a way of applying copyright to a program. It does not mean a complete waiver of copyright; otherwise, it would make copyleft impossible. The term “weak copyleft” refers to licenses in which not all derivative works inherit a copyleft license. Whether a derivative work is inherited or not often depends on how it was obtained.  Weak copyleft licenses are often used to create software libraries. Only changes to the software itself licensed with a weak copyleft are subject to the terms of such Copyleft license.This allows programs of any license to be compiled and linked with copyleft libraries such as glibc, and then redistributed without
Read more
 Week 15 IT and Ethics Ethical egoism is a term often used in the last years and it stands for philosophical and ethical position that establishes the fundamental priority of the someone's personal interests over any other interests, like public interests or the interests of other subjects.  An "egoist" is often considered as a person who thinks only of himself and / or neglects the interests of other people, while supporters of "ethical egoism" usually argue that such neglect is simply unprofitable for the them for a number of reasons and, therefore, it is not selfishness (in the form of the priority of personal interests over any others), but only a inability to foresee consequences or even stupidity. Ethical egoism in the everyday sense is the ability to live by following your own interests, without contradicting the interests of others. This concept emphasizes that corporate social responsibility is simply “good business” because it helps to reduce long-term
Read more