History of Computer Science: Overview #2

In 1950s, although many people do not believe that computer is able to become a field of scientific research at the beginning, it has been recognized gradually by academia within 50 years. IBM was one of the participants in computer science revolution during that time. Over that exploration period, IBM released the IBM 704 and later the IBM 709 computers, which are widely used. But then the computer was still relatively preliminary. They are not very easy to use. Until 1960s, computer science made considerable achievements. As time goes on, the technology of computer science improved significantly in both usability and effectiveness. Computer can be used by majority of users rather than professionals only. Initially, the price of computers was very expensive, and then, it becomes inexpensive and easy to use that almost no need any professional assistances.

While the time of being identified as a formal academic discipline is very short, computers still make a lot of science and society fundamental contributions, including:
1. The beginning of Digital revolution: the information age and the Internet.
2. The development of the concepts of programming language: one kind of tools to present information precisely at different levels of abstraction.
3. Scientific computing achieves the value of complex processing. Completely using softwares to conduct experiments also achieves the depth study of the human's minds. It makes mapping human genes to become possible as well as distributed computing project of exploring protein folding.


References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_709
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects