INTRODUCTION

TO SOCIAL
AND ETHICAL
COMPUTING
CHAPTER 1
 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF
COMPUTING AND INFORMATION
T E C H N O L O G Y, E T H I C S A N D C O M P U T E R

TO P I C - 1
OBJECTIVE

• Impact of Technology
• Controlling Technology
• History of Computing
• History of Communications
• History of Programming Languages
IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGIES
• Technology impacts society, us, often in unforeseen ways
• Examples:
• Candle light allowed us to work during hours of darkness
• Invention of automobile solved transportation problems
• created new ones, e.g. emissions problems, traffic deaths
• but reduced the number of horse-back accidents
• Digital photography eliminated chemical photography, dark rooms
• E-mail reduced Mail volume
• Laptop computers made it handy to travel with your computer
• increased neck- and back pain
• Cell phones; made users feel connected, safer
• Refrigerators allowed foods to last longer
• freon impacted the ozone layer
• Internet vastly enhanced communication
CONTROLLING TECHNOLOGIES
• Mankind, laws, dictatorships, restrictions etc. cannot really “control” inventions, but can
influence the speed of deployment, or general acceptance
• Nuclear power
• P2P networks
• Gun control
Amish People:
• Adopting new technologies affects how people relate
• Bishops meet twice a year to determine which ones to allow
• Cars? No! Create more hectic life, causes danger, pollutes
• Gas barbeque? Yes, brings people closer together
• Telephone? No, reduces face to face communication
•
HISTORY OF COMPUTING
• Manual Calculators
• 10 fingers: limited numeric range, fails to work in cold weather
• Abacus, base 5 and 10: works well with small numbers
• Mechanical Calculators
• Pascal (~1643) adder, invented at age 20!
• Leibnitz (~1660) four function calculator
• Burroughs (1890s), thought a few units saturate total market
• Charles Babbage (1810) Difference Engine, aborted for AE
• Babbage’s Analytical Engine (AE) 1835, also never completed
• Other Calculating Devices
• Bouchon, Falcon, Jacques (~1710-1750) punched cards to program repeated weaving patterns
• John Atanasoff (~1939) Iowa state prof. builds first digital computer
• Konrad Zuse (~1940) builds first relays-based digital computer with real programming language
(Plankalkül)
CONTT…
• From 1944 through 1952, the team developed a new computer called the
electronic discrete variable automatic computer (EDVAC).
• EDVAC was a stored-program computer with internal read-write memory to store program
instructions.
• By 1948, the Manchester team had produced a machine working with 32 words of memory and a
5-instruction set. Also in England, at Cambridge University, The Electronic Delay Storage
Automatic calculator, EDSAC, Was Produced n1949. In 1948, The Universal Automatic computer.
• UNIVAC became the first commercially available computer.
CONTT…
Transistors and integrated circuits
• Bell Labs (1948)
• Enabled smaller, more powerful computers
• With higher reliability, critical due to large number of parts
Microprocessors
• That way was found by Ted Hoff. Hoff designed the world’s first microprocessor, Intel 4004
(1969).
• Eventually allowed computers in everyday devices (cell phones, mp3 players, digital cameras)
• Today microprocessors have > 1 Billion transistors
HISTORY OF COMMUNICATIONS
Telegraph
• Samuel Morse (1830s)
• Telegraph machine based on electricity to communicate
• First line between Washington D.C. and Baltimore (1844)
• 200k miles of wire by 1877

Telephone
• Alexander Graham Bell (1876)
• Transmission of human voice electronically
• Loss of privacy
• Operators could eavesdrop on conversations
Typewriter (1873) and teletype (1908)
• Electronic transmission of typed text
Radio
• Marconi (1895)
• Used in 1912 by Titanic to signal distress

• Radio play that demonstrated the power of radio to blur lines of reality
Television
• Nipkow (1884), Farnsworth (1927)
• Used to broadcast Armstrong landing on the moon (1969)
ARPANET
• Precursor to Internet
• Decentralized, packet-switched data network
• Led to current Internet and its applications (E-mail, WWW)
• Cell phones
• Other gadgets: Skype, twitter, Facebook …
• the term “packet,” by Paul Baran at RAND.
• The first host-to-host protocol, called network control protocol (NCP), was developed ,By
The Network Working Group (NWG) In 1970.
• The first day of January in1983 was the transition day from NCP to TCP/IP.
HISTORY OF COMPUTING LANGUAGE:
• Some languages:
• Binary coding;
• High-level programming languages, and machine independent programming languages
• FORTRAN (~1956) John Backus, IBM
• Lisp late 1950s
• BASIC (Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) 1963 Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny at
Darthmouth
• Algol-60, committee, report 1960, Backus + Naur
• Cobol (COmmon Business Oriented Language) with decimal type, created by Capt. Grace Mary Hopper US
Navy
• APL (A Programming Language) 1950s Kenneth Iverson IBM
• Algol-W, Jovial, Algol-68, various Jovial dialects
• PL/I, IBM committee language, 1960, everything except kitchen sink
• C, Ada, Modula-2, Prolog, C++, Java, C#
• More from students …
 THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL AND
ETHICAL PROBLEMS IN COMPUTING
The Emergence of Computer Crimes
The history of computer crimes started with the invention of the computer virus.
The term virus is a Latin word which means poison.
A computer virus, defined as a self-propagating computer program designed
to alter or destroy a computer system resource.
The word “virus” was first assigned a nonbiological meaning in the 1972.
“Karen Forchat”
a piece of unwanted computer code
“Fred Cohen” a graduate student at the University of Southern California
in 1983. A real world computer program
“Len Adleman” was the first to assign the term “virus” to Cohen’s concept
THE PRESENT STATUS :
AN UNEASY CYBERSPACE
• Cyber
• Cyber space
• Cyber crimes
• Cyber vandalism
• Cyber pearl harbor
 REASONS BEHIND THE CYBER CRIMES
• communication protocols are inherently weak.
• limited knowledge of the computer network infrastructure
• dependent on technology that people does not fully understand.
• no long-term to educate the public
THE CASE FOR COMPUTER
ETHICS EDUCATION

What Is Computer Ethics ?

• It is a human actions influenced by computer technology.
According to James H. Moore,
• computer ethics is the analysis of the nature and social impact
of computer technology and the corresponding formulation and justification
of policies for the ethical use of such technology.
WHY YOU SHOULD STUDY
COMPUTER ETHICS
• Moore’s contention is that the central task of computer ethics in
decision making processes that involve computer technology should
be to “determine what should be done”
• need a plan of action that will work with the changing computing
technology and at the same time deal with the ethical issues that do
arise. We need computer ethics education
TWO SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON THIS
SUBJECT
1-the study of computer ethics as remedial moral education.
2-computer ethics education not as a moral education but as a
field
Independent field of study, there must be a unique domain for
computer
ethics distinct from the domain for moral education,
from the domains of other kinds of professional and applied
ethics
WALTER MANNER JUSTIFICATION
• According to Manner, we should study Computer Ethics because:
• doing so will make us behave like responsible professionals
• doing so will teach us how to avoid computer abuse and
catastrophes
• the advance of computing technology will continue to create
temporary policy vacuums
• the use of computing permanently transforms certain ethical issues
to the degree that their alterations require independent study
• the use of computing technology creates, and will continue to
create, novel ethical issues that require special study.