Computing is usually told in generations, and each one is really the same story: the thing that switches on and off got smaller, cheaper and more reliable.
The machine shrinking and the audience widening — one story told from two ends.
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| Generation | The switch | Who could use one |
|---|---|---|
| First (1940s) | Vacuum tubes | Governments and the military |
| Second (1950s) | Transistors | Large companies |
| Third (1960s) | Integrated circuits | Universities and mid-sized firms |
| Fourth (1970s on) | Microprocessors | Households |
| Fifth (now) | AI and cloud computing | Everyone, everywhere, all the time |
Moore's observation: For decades the number of components on a chip roughly doubled every two years. It was never a law of physics — it was a prediction the industry then organised itself around, and it has slowed.
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The fifth generation reversed something. After decades of computing moving closer to people, cloud computing moved the actual processing back into a data centre and left a screen in your hand.
What that reversal changed
- Power — the ability to compute is rented, not owned.
- Access — huge computing is available to a small organization for the first time.
- Dependence — a service stops when the provider stops.
- Location — your data sits in a building governed by another country's laws.
Real-world examples you can name
The milestones that built digital society — ENIAC 1945 · integrated circuit 1958 · Intel 4004 microprocessor 1971 · ARPANET 1969 · IBM PC 1981 · the World Wide Web proposed 1989, public 1991 · iPhone 2007
The sequence a question about the development of digital society expects you to be able to place: computing shrinks from a room to a chip, networks join the machines, the web makes the network readable, and the phone puts it in a pocket.
Who it affected: Everyone — this is the order everything else in this bank happened in.
Bitcoin and the public blockchain — network live January 2009
A currency with no issuing bank, kept honest by a shared append-only ledger that thousands of computers verify. The proof-of-work method that secures it consumes electricity on the scale of a mid-sized country.
Who it affected: Holders and traders, people in countries with unstable currencies, and everyone affected by the energy used.
How this is tested — you have to use the history as evidence in an argument about change, not recite it. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — structured question
- Part a: identify a development in computing
- Part c: evaluate whether a change was revolutionary
Paper 2 — source-based question
- Q2: explain a claim a source makes about the pace of change
- Q3: contrast two sources on whether change is speeding up
The trap: a timeline with no argument: Dates are AO1 and cap low. The marks are for what each step made possible that had been impossible.
Explain one way in which cloud computing changed who can use large-scale computing.
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To what extent has the development of computing been a story of increasing access?
Model answer plan
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