Computing, as we know it has developed greatly and rapidly in the last fifty years or so. Many individuals can be said to have contributed to the computer revolution this century, some more than significantly than others. This is assignment will concentrate on a few of these individuals and describe their pioneering achievements along with the circumstances and situations in which they materialised.

The person who arguably made the most important contribution to the development of computing was an army radar technician named Douglas Engelbart. Back in 1945, he read Vannevar Bush's article 'As We May Think', and he had a vision! His vision was that computer-based tools could augment human intellect, thus improving our overall ability to tackle the problems and goals of the individual, and of society.

During the 1950's and 60's Douglas Engelbart went on to develop the mouse, many of the features that are found in all GUI's, integrated help systems, electronic mail, teleconferencing, and interactive Hypermedia. In 1963, he set out the conceptual framework for an interactive hypermedia system in a paper entitled, A Conce

VisiCalc had no huge, splashy launch like Microsoft's Windows 95. It just quietly appeared. But it ultimately changed the way businesses operated, all around the world. The VisiCalc spreadsheet allowed company managers to enter variables such as costs and revenues, change them around, and see in a moment's notice how the changes would affect a product's performance and the company's bottom line. VisiCalc reduced the costs of building spreadsheets by 80 per cent (they were no longer time and labour intensive); and small businesses could now compete with larger ones by making the same complex financial calculations as their competitors. VisiCalc, which was inexpensive to buy and easy to use, also changed the computer industry itself; in a sense, it lent credence to the personal computer. Infact, because the first version of VisiCalc was written for the Apple II (developed before the IBM personal computer), people bought the Apple II computer specifically so they could use VisiCalc. Once VisiCalc was established, so was the PC.

In 1968, he had completed the NLS (oN Line System), which was the early realisation of Engelbart's concept of an Augmentation System. NLS pioneered many of the features that are now integral to modern online multimedia systems; mouse, windows, e-mail, word processing, and hypertext.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2088
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)