The development of the atomic bomb has immensely influenced the world. The scientific development surrounding the Atomic bomb has been a crucial point in the world's history, beginning the Atomic Age. The nuclear atom, discovered in 1911, did not reach its full power until the late 1930s. The study of atoms as a weapon started in Germany. Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in August of 1939 to tell him of the potential power of an atomic weapon.

It was only then that the United States Government began the "Manhattan Project." The project was created to research and build a usable atomic bomb. The project, By 1945, had nearly 40 laboratories and factories and employed 200,000 people. On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped a 9,000-pound nuclear device,little boy, on Hiroshima, Japan. The explosion of this atomic bomb resulted in a vast number of deaths, somewhere between 90 and 140 thousand. Three days later, a 10,000-pound bomb, fat boy, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, resulting in 60 to 80 thousand deaths. These were the only two times in history that an atomic bomb was dropped on mankind. The development of the atomic bomb, also, greatly influenced artists of the fifties. The idea that we made of millions of powerful particles heavily influenced artists such as Jackson Pollock. Pollock's style of art, which focused on capturing an imprint of the human psyche at a moment in time, lead to the creation of abstract expressionism. Many other artists emulated his style of portraying atomic energy. (<http://members.home.net/jeromej/atomic/>)

World War II produced a large need for computer power, especially for military. In 1942, John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchly, and their associates at the Moore school of Electrical Engineering of University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high - speed electronic computer to do the job. This machine became known as ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator) ENIAC was a huge machine it used 18,000 vacuum tubes, about 1,800 square feet of floor space, and consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power. It had punched card I/O, 1 multiplier, 1 divider/square rooter, and 20 adders using decimal ring counters, which served as adders and as quick-access read-write register storage. The executable instructions making up a program were embodied in the separate "units" of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a "route" for the flow of information.

These connections had to be redone after each computation, together with presetting function tables and switches. This "wire your own" technique was inconvenient, but it was efficient in handling the particular programs for which it had been designed. ENIAC is, for the most part, is accepted as the first successful high - speed electronic digital computer and it was used from 1946 to 1955. A controversy over the patentability of ENIAC's basic digital concepts developed in 1971. The claim being made that another physicist, John V. Atanasoff had, basically, already used the same ideas in a simpler vacuum - tube device he had built in the 1930's while at Iowa State College. In 1973 the courts found in favor of the company using the Atanasoff claim.

Early in the 50's two important engineering discoveries changed the electronic - computer field. These discoveries were the magnetic core memory and the Transistor - Circuit Element. These technical discoveries found their way into new models of digital computers. RAM capacities increased from 8,000 to 64,000 words in commercially available machines by the 1960's, with access times of 2 to 3 Milliseconds. These machines were very expensive to purchase, rent and were particularly expensive to operate because of the cost of expanding programming. Such computers, mostly found in large computer centers, operated by industry, government, and private laboratories - staffed with many programmers and support personnel. (<http://www.softlord.com/comp/>)

The first recorded description of a world wide network or what we would call the Internet was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He idea was a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could access data and programs from any site. This concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the head of the computer research program at DARPA, starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept. Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July 1961 and the first book on the subject in 1964. Kleinrock convinced Roberts that communicating using packets rather than circuits was the way to go, which was a major step towards computer networking. The other major step was to make the computers communicate. In 1965 working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer in Mass. to the Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first wide-area computer network ever built. The result of this experiment was the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched telephone system was very inadequate for the job. So Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching was confirmed. Roberts went to DARPA, In late 1966, to develop the computer network concept and quickly put together his plan for the "ARPANET". He published it in 1967. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury told Roberts about the NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran and others at RAND. The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964. It just happened to be that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all been developed the same way without any of the researchers knowing about the other work. The word "packet" was adopted from the work at NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. Computers were added to the ARPANET after its completion, and work proceeded on creating complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software. In December 1970 the Network Working Group working under S. Crocker finished the first ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol or NCP. As the ARPANET sites completed implementing NCP during the period 1971-1972, the network users finally could begin to develop applications. In October 1972 Kahn organized a large demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference. This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It was also in 1972 that the first "hot" application, electronic mail, was introduced. In March Ray Tomlinson wrote the basic email message send and read software, driven by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy way to communicate. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, read, file, forward, and respond to messages. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the vast growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic. (<http://www.isoc.org/internet-history/brief.html>)

Anyone can see that the postmodernistic period was a time of great change in the way people thought. We discovered the power of the atom, created electronic computers, and found a way to connect the computers together. What we should all be amazed at is we have no idea what is to come 50 years from now.

Work Cited The Atomic Bomb: A turning point in world history http://members.home.net/jeromej/atomic/ A Short History of the Computer http://www.softlord.com/comp/ Internet Society (ISCO) All About the Internet. A Brief History of the Internet http://www.softlord.com/comp/