Computers have come a long way, but in the beginning they were more associated with doing arithmetic than helping us communicate. If you just use technology, rather than also being interested and involved in building parts of it, you might not know how there is a little computer in just about everything. This is more true with every doubling until we can't shrink things anymore. The first computer was mechanical. Designed by Charles Babbage and programmed by his niece Ada Lovelace the namesake of the Ada programming language. Around WWII, the first electronic computers were developed, all for computing mathematical functions of numeric values including simple accounting. Probably we started there because that is what we are bad at naturally, accurately doing repetitve calculations again and again and getting the same results, and we built them to be very good at that.

At that time all communication and media was done with analog technologies, but a few visionaries saw how computing devices could be used to catalog, remember and share information. In the beginning, the technology could only handle text communication, but with more and more computing power in smaller devices, you could process digitized versions of any analog media and transmit them over a network where they can be stored and shared. Text still dominates at the level of websites, indexing and taxonomies, but it is also increasingly internationalized and multi-lingual. The history is very English and America centric, but there are good technological solutions already adopted as standards with almost complete penetration in existing systems.

The lessons and knowledge dumps here summarize the current state of the art. In applications we have a wide variety of communication and information processing systems. Accounting and arithmetic are part of it, but more and more a small part of it as computing and networking is applied to digitized media, and the diversity of devices constituting the entire computing network are more completely and constantly networked to each other. Between ARM based communication devices and x86 family desktops, laptops and servers you have most of the devices in the network. Even specialized high speed networking gear is increasingly built with a few different processor cores with custom logic and function blocks. These can be fully programable as an FPGA or SoC with FPGA, or compiled into ASIC parts.

Now you can buy most components off the shelf and plug a system together with standard connectors and protocols. You can get development kits for any of them and begin to design and build high value variations and you can rapidly prototype all sorts of things. Just to play and learn, or to make smart components like batteries and power electronics (for example). You can customize things for self expression or to pursue social goals. The only real barrier is the cost of the software tools to do some of the more advanced rapid prototyping. I think we can get some of the companies to work with us under existing academic licensing or similar.

Computing isn't just for accounting and grinding out engineering calculations anymore, it is for everything. You'd better understand the basics even if you're more interested is social change and sustainability that technology. If you're like me and interested in technology just because it is cool, then you are invited to help me teach everyone what they need to know about technology.

Then we can work to make computing and technology in general serve mankind as we serve our purpose in sustaining the Earth. We are clearly dependent on the entire living network of systems and the subsystems at all scales. The whole systems must be healthy and all of the living species must be healthy for us to be healthy in the long term.