7th Age of Computing

The 7th age of computing was a term first coined by Sam Soloman of Infini, it refers to a point in time in the history of computing. The ages of computing defined by this view of computing history is based on a mechanistic view of the development and availability of computing tools.

The seven ages are categorised using two criteria, firstly the number of people who have access to the tools and secondly the usefulness and power of the tools, i.e.,: what impact they have on the users life?

The first age is characterised by computing as a black art where access to computing tools is restricted to the very few, mostly academics and the military. The first age covers a very long period in human history.

The Second age of computing started on April 7, 1964 with the launch of the IBM 360 series mainframe. The 360 series mainframe became the computing bedrock of most large companies and governments worldwide. The 360 series spread computing tools to organisations outside research and the military. There were other machines from other manufacturers such as Univac, Honeywell, ICL and others but this era is overwhelmingly dominated by IBM.

The 3rd age of computing began in the mid 1970’s with the launch of various personal computer kits, included in this these platforms was the apple 1 in 1976. But the 3rd Age really belongs to IBM and Microsoft. IBM introduced the 5150 personal computer on August 12th 1981, bundled with an operating system from Microsoft. Over the next 10 years personal computing tools were put in the hands of millions of individuals and businesses.

The 4th Age of computing began just a couple of years after the launch of the IBM PC.
The giants of the 4th Age were Novell, 3com, Cisco and Microsoft, all four of these companies made major contributions in connecting the standalone pc to a local area network. The usefulness of the pc as computing tool grew exponentially when people could share files easily with others connected on the network.

The 5th Age is the early internet age which owes a lot to the work of DARPA: the US department of defence. Most people’s experience of the early internet age in terms of the interface will be their first use of the Netscape browser in 1995. The 5th Age heralded the dawning of the connected world. People were able to collaborate and publish using computing tools at minimal cost. The impact of the 5th Age was transformational; the enabling companies of the 5th age are those who did the heavy lifting and connected people to the internet such as AOL.

The 6th Age is an era of application mobility. In the 6th Age applications are freed from the users computing infrastructure. Users are able to access applications anywhere and everywhere through all sorts of devices. In the 6th Age the PC’s role as the critical computing device is challenged by a new generation of small mobile and highly connected devices. Users have extraordinary access to powerful computing tools free or at very little cost. The introduction of Cloud computing enables application developer’s access to a computing infrastructure, to deliver their applications to users on a global scale. In this Age there many companies who introduce interesting applications such as Google, FaceBook, EBay and many more.

The 7th Age is the era of ubiquitous computing. Mark Weiser coined the phrase "ubiquitous computing" around 1988, during his tenure as Chief Technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In this era, applications and computing tools become invisible to the user. Computing resources become part of the user’s world in an unobtrusive way; they assist the user to complete tasks without the user being aware of them. In this Age the computing tools combine together to deliver intelligence at the point of consumption. Infini will release on 8th of August 2008, the building blocks for ubiquitous computing.

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