INFORMATION REVOLUTION

The term information revolution describes current economic, social and

technological trends beyond the Industrial Revolution.

Development of technologies (such as computers, digital communication,

microchips) in the second half of the 20th century that has led to dramatic
reduction in the cost of obtaining, processing, storing, and transmitting
information in all forms (text, graphics, audio, video).

The British polymath crystallographer J. D. Bernal introduced the term

"scientific and technical revolution" in his 1939 book The Social Function of
Science to describe the new role that science and technology are coming to play
within society.

At the end of world war 2 the first electronic digital computer ENIAC weigh
30 tons, 18,000 vacuum tubes, and occupied a space a large as a truck

ENIAC was the first electronic general-purpose computer. It was Turing-complete,

digital and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through
reprogramming

On May 31, 1943, the military commission for the new computer began
with the partnership of John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert with the former
serving as the chief consultant and Eckert as the chief engineer. Eckert had been
a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical
Engineering when he and Mauchly met in 1943. It took the team about one year to
design the ENIAC and then 18 months plus half a million dollars in tax money to
build it. The machine wasn't officially turned on until November 1945, by which
time the war was over. However, not all was lost, and the military still put ENIAC
to work, performing calculations for the design of a hydrogen bomb, weather
predictions, cosmic-ray studies, thermal ignition, random-number studies, and
wind-tunnel design.

In 1946, Mauchly and Eckert developed the Electrical Numerical Integrator

And Calculator (ENIAC).