Functions of Management

There are acts that are inevitable in life like death, no matter how old or young you are at some point you will die. There is also another act that everyone will deal with as long as you are alive, this act is change. Change happens regardless of the fact that you may not be ready for it or if you anticipate it ahead of time. Throughout our American history we have endured change for the better in some cases and for the worse in other cases, through it all technology has changed to make human life a little simpler. Many would argue that there are numerous technological changes that have had a major impact on American lives throughout history, but there are few technological changes that have had a bigger impact than the advancement of the computer. The world as we know it now would not be the same if not for the invention of the computer, and its many changes and evolutions to simplify what would otherwise be nearly impossible tasks.

The world’s first electronic computer was built between the years of 1939 and 1942. The inventors were Professor John Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry. “ The Atanasoff-Berry Computer represented several innovations in computing, including a binary system of arithmetic, parallel processing, regenerative memory and a separation of memory and computing functions”(Bellis,2002,p.3). This is the first of many examples of how computers have changed lives in American history. With their invention Atanasoff and Berry mad human life a little easier because they could simplify the process of solving lengthy calculations.”One of the most difficult aspects of doing a large calculation with either a slide rule or a large mechanical sliding machine is keeping track of all intermediate results and using them, in their proper place, in later steps of the calculation”(Bellis,2002,p1). This was one of the many ways the first computer changed American lives as it was known. Change came around again when Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper decided to improve on the worlds first electronic computer in 1944. Their version of the computer was a little more accessible than Atanasoff and Berry’s model, their version called the Mark I was used by the U.S. Navy for complicated gunnery and ballistic calculations. The Mark I dwarfed the first computer model in size and in operations that it could output. The Mark I was the size of a full room 55 feet long and 8 feet high, it weighed 5 tons and consisted of 760,000 separate pieces.” It had special subroutines for logarithms and trigonometric function and used 23 decimal place numbers”(Bellis,2002,p.4). Computer technology continued to evolve and effect the people of the world in positive ways. The more people attained