The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload is a bestselling popular science book written by the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin , PhD, and first published by Dutton Penguin in the United States and Canada in 2014. It is Levitin's 3rd consecutive best-seller, debuting at #2 on the New York Times Best Seller List , #1 on the Canadian best-seller lists, #1 on Amazon, and #5 on The London Times bestseller list.
70-482: In The Organized Mind , Levitin demonstrates how the Information Age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data, and uses the latest brain science to explain how the brain can organize this flood of information. Levitin then demonstrates methods that readers can use to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time. It answers three fundamental questions: Why does
140-537: A microphone ). The signals take any value from a given range, and each unique signal value represents different information. Any change in the signal is meaningful, and each level of the signal represents a different level of the phenomenon that it represents. For example, suppose the signal is being used to represent temperature, with one volt representing one degree Celsius . In such a system, 10 volts would represent 10 degrees, and 10.1 volts would represent 10.1 degrees. Another method of conveying an analogue signal
210-523: A connection, and nearly half of Americans and people in several other countries used the Internet on a regular basis. However throughout the 1990s, "getting online" entailed complicated configuration, and dial-up was the only connection type affordable by individual users; the present day mass Internet culture was not possible. In 1989, about 15% of all households in the United States owned
280-517: A dedicated home video game console according to an Entertainment Software Association annual industry report . By 2012, over 2 billion people used the Internet, twice the number using it in 2007. Cloud computing had entered the mainstream by the early 2010s. In January 2013, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported owning a smartphone . By 2016, half of the world's population was connected and as of 2020, that number has risen to 67%. In
350-618: A dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. By the early 1980s, along with improvements in computing power , the proliferation of the smaller and less expensive personal computers allowed for immediate access to information and the ability to share and store it. Connectivity between computers within organizations enabled access to greater amounts of information. The world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed ) exabytes (EB) in 1986 to 15.8 EB in 1993; over 54.5 EB in 2000; and to 295 (optimally compressed) EB in 2007. This
420-460: A human brain has been estimated to lie between 10^15 and 10^17. While this number is impressive, even in 2007 humanity's general-purpose computers were capable of performing well over 10^18 instructions per second. Estimates suggest that the storage capacity of an individual human brain is about 10^12 bytes. On a per capita basis, this is matched by current digital storage (5x10^21 bytes per 7.2x10^9 people). Genetic code may also be considered part of
490-426: A lot more oxygenated glucose (the fuel the brain runs on) than focusing on one task does, and can lead quickly to mental exhaustion. The second and third parts of the book show how readers can use their attentional and memory systems for better organization, from the classroom to the boardroom, from home lives to interactions with friends, doctors, and business associates. On publication, the book received praise from
560-409: A network of networks. The Whole Earth movement of the 1960s advocated the use of new technology. In the 1970s, the home computer was introduced, time-sharing computers , the video game console , the first coin-op video games, and the golden age of arcade video games began with Space Invaders . As digital technology proliferated, and the switch from analog to digital record keeping became
630-455: A personal computer. For households with children, nearly 30% owned a computer in 1989, and in 2000, 65% owned one. Cell phones became as ubiquitous as computers by the early 2000s, with movie theaters beginning to show ads telling people to silence their phones. They also became much more advanced than phones of the 1990s, most of which only took calls or at most allowed for the playing of simple games. Text messaging became widely used in
700-547: A rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during the Industrial Revolution , to an economy centered on information technology . The onset of the Information Age has been linked to the development of the transistor in 1947 and the optical amplifier in 1957. These technological advances have had a significant impact on the way information is processed and transmitted. According to
770-404: A signal is, mainly the noise present in the original signal and the noise added by processing (see signal-to-noise ratio ). Fundamental physical limits such as the shot noise in components limits the resolution of analogue signals. In digital electronics additional precision is obtained by using additional digits to represent the signal. The practical limit in the number of digits is determined by
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#1732779929979840-399: A single MOS chip by the late 1960s. The application of MOS LSI chips to computing was the basis for the first microprocessors , as engineers began recognizing that a complete computer processor could be contained on a single MOS LSI chip. In 1968, Fairchild engineer Federico Faggin improved MOS technology with his development of the silicon-gate MOS chip, which he later used to develop
910-403: A standard until the mid-2000s outside Japan. The World Wide Web became publicly accessible in 1991, which had been available only to government and universities. In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina introduced Mosaic , the first web browser capable of displaying inline images and the basis for later browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Stanford Federal Credit Union
980-465: A wide array of people including former U.S. Secretary of State (and Secretary of the Treasury ) George P. Shultz ; Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal (ret.), Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Stanley Prusiner , and head writer for The Big Bang Theory , Eric Kaplan . Information Age The Information Age is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by
1050-608: Is random disturbances or variations, some caused by the random thermal vibrations of atomic particles. Since all variations of an analogue signal are significant, any disturbance is equivalent to a change in the original signal and so appears as noise. As the signal is copied and re-copied, or transmitted over long distances, these random variations become more significant and lead to signal degradation . Other sources of noise may include crosstalk from other signals or poorly designed components. These disturbances are reduced by shielding and by using low-noise amplifiers (LNA). Since
1120-421: Is the informational equivalent to less than one 730- megabyte (MB) CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person); roughly four CD-ROM per person in 1993; twelve CD-ROM per person in the year 2000; and almost sixty-one CD-ROM per person in 2007. It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has reached 5 zettabytes in 2014, the informational equivalent of 4,500 stacks of printed books from
1190-405: Is to use modulation . In this, some base carrier signal has one of its properties altered: amplitude modulation (AM) involves altering the amplitude of a sinusoidal voltage waveform by the source information, frequency modulation (FM) changes the frequency. Other techniques, such as phase modulation or changing the phase of the carrier signal, are also used. In an analogue sound recording,
1260-418: Is used to change a digital signal to an analogue signal. A DAC takes a series of binary numbers and converts it to an analogue signal. It is common to find a DAC in the gain-control system of an op-amp which in turn may be used to control digital amplifiers and filters. Analogue circuits are typically harder to design, requiring more skill than comparable digital systems to conceptualize. An analogue circuit
1330-436: Is usually designed by hand because the application is built into the hardware. Digital hardware, on the other hand, has a great deal of commonality across applications and can be mass-produced in a standardised form. Hardware design consists largely of repeated identical blocks and the design process can be highly automated. This is one of the main reasons that digital systems have become more common than analogue devices. However,
1400-581: The Deltar for water management in the Netherlands, network analyzers for electrical systems, and various machines for aiming military guns and bombs. The construction of problem-specific analog computers continued in the late 1940s and beyond, with FERMIAC for neutron transport, Project Cyclone for various military applications, and the Phillips Machine for economic modeling. Building on
1470-528: The Intel 4004 , the first single-chip microprocessor. It was released by Intel in 1971, and laid the foundations for the microcomputer revolution that began in the 1970s. MOS technology also led to the development of semiconductor image sensors suitable for digital cameras . The first such image sensor was the charge-coupled device , developed by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969, based on MOS capacitor technology. The public
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#17327799299791540-566: The LEO being the first commercially available general-purpose computer. Digital communication became economical for widespread adoption after the invention of the personal computer in the 1970s. Claude Shannon , a Bell Labs mathematician, is credited for having laid out the foundations of digitalization in his pioneering 1948 article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication . In 1948, Bardeen and Brattain patented an insulated-gate transistor (IGFET) with an inversion layer. Their concept, forms
1610-609: The Netherlands became the first countries to completely transition from analog to digital television . In September 2007, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported having broadband internet at home. According to estimates from the Nielsen Media Research , approximately 45.7 million U.S. households in 2006 (or approximately 40 percent of approximately 114.4 million) owned a dedicated home video game console , and by 2015, 51 percent of U.S. households owned
1680-472: The T-carrier for long-haul pulse-code modulation (PCM) digital voice transmission. The T1 format carried 24 pulse-code modulated, time-division multiplexed speech signals each encoded in 64 kbit/s streams, leaving 8 kbit/s of framing information which facilitated the synchronization and demultiplexing at the receiver. Over the subsequent decades the digitisation of voice became the norm for all but
1750-690: The United Nations Public Administration Network , the Information Age was formed by capitalizing on computer miniaturization advances, which led to modernized information systems and internet communications as the driving force of social evolution . There is ongoing debate concerning whether the Third Industrial Revolution has already ended and if the Fourth Industrial Revolution has already begun due to
1820-490: The arithmometer and the enabling technology of the punch card . Charles Babbage proposed a mechanical general-purpose computer called the Analytical Engine , but it was never successfully built, and was largely forgotten by the 20th century and unknown to most of the inventors of modern computers. The Second Industrial Revolution in the last quarter of the 19th century developed useful electrical circuits and
1890-401: The digital technology that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with digital imaging , storage , and transmission media , whereby vast increases in the rapidity of information growth would be made possible through automated , potentially- lossless digital technologies. Accordingly, Moore's law , formulated around 1965, would calculate that the number of transistors in
1960-567: The earth to the sun . The amount of digital data stored appears to be growing approximately exponentially , reminiscent of Moore's law . As such, Kryder's law prescribes that the amount of storage space available appears to be growing approximately exponentially. The world's technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks was 432 exabytes of (optimally compressed ) information in 1986; 715 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1993; 1.2 (optimally compressed) zettabytes in 2000; and 1.9 zettabytes in 2007,
2030-485: The information revolution . Now that sequencing has been computerized, genome can be rendered and manipulated as data. This started with DNA sequencing , invented by Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam in 1976-1977 and Frederick Sanger in 1977, grew steadily with the Human Genome Project , initially conceived by Gilbert and finally, the practical applications of sequencing, such as gene testing , after
2100-479: The journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2016 reported that: Digital technology has vastly exceeded the cognitive capacity of any single human being and has done so a decade earlier than predicted. In terms of capacity, there are two measures of importance: the number of operations a system can perform and the amount of information that can be stored. The number of synaptic operations per second in
2170-419: The planar process developed by Jean Hoerni . In 1963, complementary MOS (CMOS) was developed by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor . The self-aligned gate transistor, which further facilitated mass production, was invented in 1966 by Robert Bower at Hughes Aircraft and independently by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace at Bell Labs. In 1962 AT&T deployed
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2240-456: The telegraph . In the 1880s, Herman Hollerith developed electromechanical tabulating and calculating devices using punch cards and unit record equipment , which became widespread in business and government. Meanwhile, various analog computer systems used electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic systems to model problems and calculate answers. These included an 1872 tide-predicting machine , differential analysers , perpetual calendar machines,
2310-528: The 1990s, the spread of the Internet caused a sudden leap in access to and ability to share information in businesses and homes globally. A computer that cost $ 3000 in 1997 would cost $ 2000 two years later and $ 1000 the following year, due to the rapid advancement of technology. The world's technological capacity to compute information with human-guided general-purpose computers grew from 3.0 × 10 MIPS in 1986, to 4.4 × 10 MIPS in 1993; to 2.9 × 10 MIPS in 2000; to 6.4 × 10 MIPS in 2007. An article featured in
2380-606: The Scientific Age and the Industrial Age all, ultimately, induced discontinuous and irreversible changes in the economic, social and cultural elements of the daily life of most people. Traditionally, these epochs have taken place over hundreds, or in the case of the Neolithic Revolution, thousands of years, whereas the Information Age swept to all parts of the globe in just a few years, as a result of
2450-404: The United States; their first survey showed that 8.2% of all U.S. households owned a personal computer in 1984, and that households with children under the age of 18 were nearly twice as likely to own one at 15.3% (middle and upper middle class households were the most likely to own one, at 22.9%). By 1989, 15% of all U.S. households owned a computer, and nearly 30% of households with children under
2520-459: The age of 18 owned one. By the late 1980s, many businesses were dependent on computers and digital technology. Motorola created the first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTac , in 1983. However, this device used analog communication - digital cell phones were not sold commercially until 1991 when the 2G network started to be opened in Finland to accommodate the unexpected demand for cell phones that
2590-505: The application of digital hardware is a function of the software / firmware and creating this is still largely a labour-intensive process. Since the early 2000s, there were some platforms that were developed which enabled analogue design to be defined using software - which allows faster prototyping. Furthermore, if a digital electronic device is to interact with the real world, it will always need an analogue interface. For example, every digital radio receiver has an analogue preamplifier as
2660-470: The basis of CMOS and DRAM technology today. In 1957 at Bell Labs, Frosch and Derick were able to manufacture planar silicon dioxide transistors, later a team at Bell Labs demonstrated a working MOSFET. The first integrated circuit milestone was achieved by Jack Kilby in 1958. Other important technological developments included the invention of the monolithic integrated circuit chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, made possible by
2730-406: The brain pay attention to some things and not others? Why do we remember some things and not others? And how can we use that knowledge to better organize our home and workplaces, our time, social world, and decision making? The book is divided in three parts. The first part focuses on attention . Levitin explains why attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism and describes how
2800-517: The brain's attentional system works: it determines which aspects of the environment an individual will deal with, and what gets passed through to that individual's conscious awareness. The attentional awareness system is the reason one can safely drive or walk to work without noticing most of the buildings or cars one passes by. Additionally, Levitin reveals that the phrase "paying attention" is scientifically true. Multitasking comes at an actual metabolic cost: switching back and forth between tasks burns
2870-494: The complexity of the Z1 and Z2 , German inventor Konrad Zuse used electromechanical systems to complete in 1941 the Z3 , the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. Also during World War II, Allied engineers constructed electromechanical bombes to break German Enigma machine encoding. The base-10 electromechanical Harvard Mark I was completed in 1944, and
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2940-849: The discovery by Myriad Genetics of the BRCA1 breast cancer gene mutation. Sequence data in Genbank has grown from the 606 genome sequences registered in December 1982 to the 231 million genomes in August 2021. An additional 13 trillion incomplete sequences are registered in the Whole Genome Shotgun submission database as of August 2021. The information contained in these registered sequences has doubled every 18 months. During rare times in human history, there have been periods of innovation that have transformed human life. The Neolithic Age ,
3010-601: The first stage in the receive chain. Design of analogue circuits has been greatly eased by the advent of software circuit simulators such as SPICE . IBM developed their own in-house simulator, ASTAP , in the 1970s which used an unusual (compared to other simulators) sparse matrix method of circuit analysis. Analogue circuits can be entirely passive , consisting of resistors , capacitors and inductors . Active circuits also contain active elements such as transistors . Traditional circuits are built from lumped elements – that is, discrete components. However, an alternative
3080-408: The following year. In 2002, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported having a mobile phone . In late 2005 the population of the Internet reached 1 billion, and 3 billion people worldwide used cell phones by the end of the decade. HDTV became the standard television broadcasting format in many countries by the end of the decade. In September and December 2006 respectively, Luxembourg and
3150-626: The groundwork for the advent of civilization. The Scientific Age began in the period between Galileo 's 1543 proof that the planets orbit the Sun and Newton 's publication of the laws of motion and gravity in Principia in 1697. This age of discovery continued through the 18th century, accelerated by widespread use of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg . The Industrial Age began in Great Britain in 1760 and continued into
3220-426: The information equivalent of 174 newspapers per person per day. The world's effective capacity to exchange information through two-way Telecommunications networks was 281 petabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986; 471 petabytes in 1993; 2.2 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2000; and 65 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007, the information equivalent of six newspapers per person per day. In
3290-468: The information is quantized , as long as the signal stays inside a range of values, it represents the same information. In digital circuits the signal is regenerated at each logic gate , lessening or removing noise. In analogue circuits, signal loss can be regenerated with amplifiers . However, noise is cumulative throughout the system and the amplifier itself will add to the noise according to its noise figure . A number of factors affect how precise
3360-418: The information is encoded differently in analogue and digital electronics , the way they process a signal is consequently different. All operations that can be performed on an analogue signal such as amplification , filtering , limiting, and others, can also be duplicated in the digital domain. Every digital circuit is also an analogue circuit, in that the behaviour of any digital circuit can be explained using
3430-440: The last mile (where analogue continued to be the norm right into the late 1990s). Following the development of MOS integrated circuit chips in the early 1960s, MOS chips reached higher transistor density and lower manufacturing costs than bipolar integrated circuits by 1964. MOS chips further increased in complexity at a rate predicted by Moore's law , leading to large-scale integration (LSI) with hundreds of transistors on
3500-700: The late 1980s, less than 1% of the world's technologically stored information was in digital format, while it was 94% in 2007, with more than 99% by 2014. It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has increased from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986, to some 5,000 exabytes in 2014 (5 zettabytes ). Library expansion was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years where sufficient space made available. He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs , which could be duplicated on-demand for library patrons and other institutions. Rider did not foresee, however,
3570-522: The late 1990s worldwide, except for in the United States of America where text messaging didn't become commonplace till the early 2000s. The digital revolution became truly global in this time as well - after revolutionizing society in the developed world in the 1990s, the digital revolution spread to the masses in the developing world in the 2000s. By 2000, a majority of U.S. households had at least one personal computer and internet access
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#17327799299793640-409: The mid-19th century. The invention of machines such as the mechanical textile weaver by Edmund Cartwrite, the rotating shaft steam engine by James Watt and the cotton gin by Eli Whitney , along with processes for mass manufacturing, came to serve the needs of a growing global population. The Industrial Age harnessed steam and waterpower to reduce the dependence on animal and human physical labor as
3710-589: The new standard in business, a relatively new job description was popularized, the data entry clerk . Culled from the ranks of secretaries and typists from earlier decades, the data entry clerk's job was to convert analog data (customer records, invoices, etc.) into digital data. In developed nations, computers achieved semi-ubiquity during the 1980s as they made their way into schools, homes, business, and industry. Automated teller machines , industrial robots , CGI in film and television, electronic music , bulletin board systems , and video games all fueled what became
3780-431: The other hand, are not affected at all by the presence of noise until a certain threshold is reached, at which point they fail catastrophically. For digital telecommunications , it is possible to increase the noise threshold with the use of error detection and correction coding schemes and algorithms. Nevertheless, there is still a point at which catastrophic failure of the link occurs. In digital electronics, because
3850-437: The performance of the analogue-to-digital converter (ADC), since digital operations can usually be performed without loss of precision. The ADC takes an analogue signal and changes it into a series of binary numbers . The ADC may be used in simple digital display devices, e. g., thermometers or light meters but it may also be used in digital sound recording and in data acquisition. However, a digital-to-analogue converter (DAC)
3920-402: The popular medium of choice. Humans have manufactured tools for counting and calculating since ancient times, such as the abacus , astrolabe , equatorium , and mechanical timekeeping devices. More complicated devices started appearing in the 1600s, including the slide rule and mechanical calculators . By the early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution had produced mass-market calculators like
3990-555: The primary means of production. Thus, the core of the Industrial Revolution was the generation and distribution of energy from coal and water to produce steam and, later in the 20th century, electricity. Analog electronics Analogue electronics ( American English : analog electronics ) are electronic systems with a continuously variable signal, in contrast to digital electronics where signals usually take only two levels . The term analogue describes
4060-467: The proportional relationship between a signal and a voltage or current that represents the signal. The word analogue is derived from the Greek word ανάλογος analogos meaning proportional . An analogue signal uses some attribute of the medium to convey the signal's information. For example, an aneroid barometer uses the angular position of a needle on top of a contracting and expanding box as
4130-1332: The rapidly advancing speed of information exchange. Between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago during the Neolithic period, humans began to domesticate animals, began to farm grains and to replace stone tools with ones made of metal. These innovations allowed nomadic hunter-gatherers to settle down. Villages formed along the Yangtze River in China in 6,500 B.C., the Nile River region of Africa and in Mesopotamia ( Iraq ) in 6,000 B.C. Cities emerged between 6,000 B.C. and 3,500 B.C. The development of written communication ( cuneiform in Sumeria and hieroglyphs in Egypt in 3,500 B.C. and writing in Egypt in 2,560 B.C. and in Minoa and China around 1,450 B.C.) enabled ideas to be preserved for extended periods to spread extensively. In all, Neolithic developments, augmented by writing as an information tool, laid
4200-467: The recent breakthroughs in areas such as artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. This next transition has been theorized to harken the advent of the Imagination Age . The digital revolution converted technology from analog format to digital format. By doing this, it became possible to make copies that were identical to the original. In digital communications, for example, repeating hardware
4270-485: The rules of analogue circuits. The use of microelectronics has made digital devices cheap and widely available. The effect of noise on an analogue circuit is a function of the level of noise. The greater the noise level, the more the analogue signal is disturbed, slowly becoming less usable. Because of this, analogue signals are said to "fail gracefully". Analogue signals can still contain intelligible information with very high levels of noise. Digital circuits, on
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#17327799299794340-406: The signal to convey the information of changes in atmospheric pressure . Electrical signals may represent information by changing their voltage , current , frequency , or total charge . Information is converted from some other physical form (such as sound , light , temperature , pressure , position) to an electrical signal by a transducer which converts one type of energy into another (e.g.
4410-451: The variation in pressure of a sound striking a microphone creates a corresponding variation in the current passing through it or voltage across it. An increase in the volume of the sound causes the fluctuation of the current or voltage to increase proportionally while keeping the same waveform or shape. Mechanical , pneumatic , hydraulic , and other systems may also use analogue signals. Analogue systems invariably include noise that
4480-478: The zeitgeist of the 1980s. Millions of people purchased home computers, making household names of early personal computer manufacturers such as Apple , Commodore, and Tandy. To this day the Commodore 64 is often cited as the best selling computer of all time, having sold 17 million units (by some accounts) between 1982 and 1994. In 1984, the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting data on computer and Internet use in
4550-489: Was able to amplify the digital signal and pass it on with no loss of information in the signal. Of equal importance to the revolution was the ability to easily move the digital information between media, and to access or distribute it remotely. One turning point of the revolution was the change from analog to digitally recorded music. During the 1980s the digital format of optical compact discs gradually replaced analog formats, such as vinyl records and cassette tapes , as
4620-625: Was also invented in the late 1980s. Disney's CAPS system (created 1988) was used for a scene in 1989's The Little Mermaid and for all their animation films between 1990's The Rescuers Down Under and 2004's Home on the Range . Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The first public digital HDTV broadcast was of the 1990 World Cup that June; it was played in 10 theaters in Spain and Italy. However, HDTV did not become
4690-486: Was becoming apparent in the late 1980s. Compute! magazine predicted that CD-ROM would be the centerpiece of the revolution, with multiple household devices reading the discs. The first true digital camera was created in 1988, and the first were marketed in December 1989 in Japan and in 1990 in the United States. By the early 2000s, digital cameras had eclipsed traditional film in popularity. Digital ink and paint
4760-500: Was first introduced to the concepts that led to the Internet when a message was sent over the ARPANET in 1969. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I , CYCLADES , Merit Network , Tymnet , and Telenet , were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols . The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking , in which multiple separate networks could be joined into
4830-514: Was the first financial institution to offer online internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994. In 1996 OP Financial Group , also a cooperative bank , became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. The Internet expanded quickly, and by 1996, it was part of mass culture and many businesses listed websites in their ads. By 1999, almost every country had
4900-527: Was to some degree improved with inspiration from Charles Babbage's designs. In 1947, the first working transistor , the germanium -based point-contact transistor , was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs . This led the way to more advanced digital computers . From the late 1940s, universities, military, and businesses developed computer systems to digitally replicate and automate previously manually performed mathematical calculations, with
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