Top Talent Drives the Global Economy

The Global Economy is a large and complex entity, like the wheel of a great big Ferris wheel. We can't look down and see where it's heading or how it works: It does what it does, and we do what we do. The global economy is a moving target; wherever you live, you'll have the same opportunities to find work that are open to those who are willing to work for them. Obviously no one wants their country's economy ruined by foreign trade — people want the best workers at the best price. Top talent drives this global economy -- here were some of today’s top industry professionals:

The world has changed a lot in the last 100 years. Migrations of hundreds of millions of people, changes in political systems and borders, wars, and economic booms and busts have all played a role in shifting the world's resources around. World War II brought us innovations that are still with us today, such as jet engines and computer technology. The war also reduced growth in Europe steeply: the United States was the only country to escape this decline.

In 1947 under President Harry S Truman the U.S. Department of Defense created Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to undertake research into new military technologies like ballistic missiles, electronic computers, communications satellites and advanced aircraft. ARPA invested in technologies that would become critical later in the Internet, such as packet switching and TCP/IP. The creation of ARPANET was the beginning of a long process toward the modern Internet.

After World War II ended, significant government investment was made in scientific research in Europe. In 1948 Great Britain launched the world's first electronic computer, the Manchester Baby, and it made major strides during the 1950s to develop faster computers.

In 1959 The European Economic Community (EEC) was founded. Seven countries, Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom signed the Treaty of Rome and became partners in what would eventually become the European Union (EU). The EEC is a permanent union of countries working together to solve European problems. The EEC itself was based on several earlier international organizations that had attempted to foster economic cooperation in Europe.

During the 1970s American microprocessor companies such as Intel, AMD and Motorola started to dominate computer manufacturing. Intel's 8080 microprocessor was an improved version of its 8008 microcomputer processor released in 1972. It had been designed for plug-in peripheral circuit boards and could be used with a minimum of support from circuits external to the main processor itself. The 8080 was a huge success and was manufactured in many different versions as well as a number of clones.

In 1973 the first programmable handheld calculator, the Hewlett-Packard HP 35, was put on sale after its public unveiling at the October 1972 COMDEX computer conference in Las Vegas.

In the early 1970s both the U.S. military and political leaders began to grow concerned about maintaining control of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics research, fearing that developments in these fields might eventually produce unintended consequences which could threaten national security or civilian control in general. In December 1973 U.S. President Nixon and Soviet leader Brezhnev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), which called for both countries to have a limited number of defensive anti-missile sites. In 1974 the U.S. Congress passed an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act that prohibited any research in AIs or robotics that could be used for military purposes.

In 1977 Inventor Ed Roberts introduced his Altair 8800, with a front panel flashing lights and switches, as a sort of stripped-down computer kit, using Intel's 8080 chip and running BASIC language programming commands from an attached airborne teletype machine.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, computers became more accessible to the general public through the introduction of inexpensive microcomputers. The first home computers such as the TRS-80, Commodore PET, Apple II, and Atari 400 were available with a variety of software packages.

The 1980s saw the rise of home computing which made microcomputers affordable by many in developed countries. The term "PC" is used generically to describe any personal computer that uses a single-tasking operating system, usually MS-DOS. Manufacturers such as IBM and Compaq created powerful PCs known as microcomputers or workstations which were much larger than the home computers but had greater capabilities in terms of memory and functionality.

The first microcomputer appeared in 1971 when former Intel co-founder and manager Gordon E. Moore released a number of Intel paper describing the capabilities of microelectronics in commercial applications. The following year, American electronics engineer Steve Wozniak designed the first Apple I personal computer. It had 2 kilobytes (kB) of RAM, a custom-built motherboard and 8 kB of video memory which enabled it to generate and display 640×200 bitmap graphics at 1 MHz, which at that time was considered to be a very high speed.

Many people consider the Apple II to be the first popular mass-produced microcomputer in history. It was designed primarily to run software applications stored on floppy disks, which would be replaced by hard drives a few years later. The Apple II had an opening price of US$1298, which was expensive at the time (although it cost thousands of dollars less than a minicomputer).

Microsoft released its Microsoft BASIC programming language in 1975 which became one of the most popular programming languages in the world. It was designed to run on any 8088 class system and allowed users to write machine code via a series of commands. This led to the development of a number of third party programs that allowed users easy access to the hardware functions. The first program that used hardware access capability was published by Bruce Webster and George Morrow in December 1978. Their program was called CP/M, which stood for Control Program for Microcomputers. This program had the advantage of allowing users to directly access various addresses of memory and direct the computer to operate in a specific mode. CP/M was difficult to learn, as it was written in machine code and programs were stored on disk.

Microsoft developed a BASIC language interpreter that allowed users to run many of these third-party applications on their machines. Steve Wozniak later used this capability to port CP/M programs written by others onto his own machine.

Conclusion

The 1980s saw the rise of personal computers and the rapid fall of IBM's mainframe business, which dominated computer technology for 20 years. IBM's $5 billion mainframe computer business fell to $2 billion in just four years. The PCB industry was also disrupted at this time as PC production exploded. There were tens of thousands of third-party manufacturers and millions of PCs being produced worldwide, a huge change from 1969 when only 120 mainframes were produced.

IBM also released its first PCs in 1981 which were loosely based on its earlier S100 bus machines, with further models being released during the following year. Towards the end of 1983 IBM shipped over 9 million single-tasking DOS systems to date.