Computers and progress
The amount of information in today's world is immense. More and more people, groups of people, organizations and even countries become dependent on the amount of information and the ability to effectively process it. Before you make a decision, especially in those areas where the accuracy is crucial, you must gather, analyze, process, interpret and understand a great amount of information. For a certain period of time all such work was performed by people that spent years studying and getting enough knowledge and skills to perform such type of work. But at a certain moment of time in the history the huge amount of information that the man was forced to analyze and work with became so great that it became impossible to process everything effectively. That's why people turned to special technical means of handling numerical and other types of information. With the advent of modern technologies first computers were created to assist people in analyzing and processing the information they had to cope with.
Computers have literally changed the world. Today they are a part of everyday life for almost everybody, although not so long ago they were considered something so expensive and complex that only big companies could afford. Imagine how long it took to analyze thousands and millions of numerical data for, say, a statistical institution. Or how long it took to perform all calculations for construction of a building, a bridge etc. Or how long it took for a bank to perform all the necessary procedures in order to process a payment.
Modern computers represent one of the greatest achievements of humanity of all times. It's difficult to overestimate the positive change that computers brought in our lives. Education, science, all types of technologies, medicine, financial science, transport, production, entertainment, mass media are among the spheres of every country's economy that would have to literally die if they did not use computers daily, hourly, or ever continuously.
Computers themselves have undergone amazing development for the last two decades. And this is something that distinguishes computer technologies from any other technologies in the world – for these two past decades computers have changed so greatly that the ones that existed in the 90 are not able to perform the amount of work that the ones being created now do. Just imagine that the first real computers created in the world could not even perform the amount of calculations that the computers standing in almost everyone's bedroom do. First computers used tubes and broke down very often, but still, they were computers. We can laugh now, but first laptops were so big and heavy that they had to be put in a car trunk for transportation. Well, people had no choice - the work needed to be done everywhere, where there were no communications, no electricity, no infrastructure, nothing at all. If you compare the life of a modern computer technology with the life of any other technology you'll see that computers are evolving faster than anything else. If you take defense industry you may see tanks that have been working for 30 years already and are still considered modern. On the other hand, if you buy a computer, it'll get old and outdated in half a year! Although we take computers as something very usual today, there's no doubt that they have changed the world greatly, simplified and improved the lives of millions of people who may not even guess what computers have done for them.