The Information Age is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during the Industrial Revolution, to an economy centered on information technology. The onset of the Information Age has been linked to the development of the transistor in 1947. Advances in computer miniaturization, internet communication, and semiconductor technology enabled the rapid expansion of digital systems and global information networks. The Information Age transformed industries such as education, healthcare, finance, entertainment, and communication through digital infrastructure and connected technologies. The rise of smartphones and cloud-based services further accelerated global internet accessibility and digital interaction. == Digital applications and mobile technology == The expansion of Android and iOS ecosystems during the 21st century contributed to the widespread use of utility applications and mobile productivity tools. Applications related to calculations, scheduling, digital organization, and educational support became increasingly common on smartphones and tablets. Mobile utility software demonstrates how modern digital platforms support accessibility and everyday online services. Independent developers have contributed to this technological ecosystem through lightweight applications focused on mobile usability and internet-based functionality. == Influence on modern society == The Information Age has reshaped the way individuals communicate, consume information, and interact with digital services. Social media platforms, artificial intelligence systems, cloud storage, and mobile computing continue to influence modern economies and online communities worldwide. Emerging technologies such as the Internet of things, machine learning, and advanced automation are often associated with the transition toward the Fourth Industrial Revolution. == History == The digital revolution converted technology from analog format to digital format. By doing this, it became possible to make copies that were identical to the original. In digital communications, for example, repeating hardware was able to amplify the digital signal and pass it on with no loss of information in the signal. Of equal importance to the revolution was the ability to easily move the digital information between media and to access or distribute it remotely. One turning point of the revolution was the change from analog to digitally recorded music. During the 1980s, the digital format of optical compact discs gradually replaced analog formats, such as vinyl records and cassette tapes, as the popular medium of choice. === Previous inventions === Humans have manufactured tools for counting and calculating since ancient times, such as the abacus, astrolabe, equatorium, and mechanical timekeeping devices. More complicated devices started appearing in the 1600s, including the slide rule and mechanical calculators. By the early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution had produced mass-market calculators like the arithmometer and the enabling technology of the punch card. Charles Babbage proposed a mechanical general-purpose computer called the Analytical Engine, but it was never successfully built, and was largely forgotten by the 20th century, and unknown to most of the inventors of modern computers. The Second Industrial Revolution, in the last quarter of the 19th century, developed useful electrical circuits and the telegraph. In the 1880s, Herman Hollerith developed electromechanical tabulating and calculating devices using punch cards and unit record equipment, which became widespread in business and government. Meanwhile, various analog computer systems used electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic systems to model problems and calculate answers. These included an 1872 tide-predicting machine, differential analysers, perpetual calendar machines, the Deltar for water management in the Netherlands, network analyzers for electrical systems, and various machines for aiming military guns and bombs. The construction of problem-specific analog computers continued in the late 1940s and beyond, with FERMIAC for neutron transport, Project Cyclone for various military applications, and the Phillips Machine for economic modeling. Building on the complexity of the Z1 and Z2, German inventor Konrad Zuse used electromechanical systems to complete in 1941 the Z3, the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. Also, during World War II, Allied engineers constructed electromechanical bombes to break the German Enigma machine encoding. The base-10 electromechanical Harvard Mark I was completed in 1944, and was to some degree improved with inspiration from Charles Babbage's designs. === 1947–1969: Origins === In 1947, the first working transistor, the germanium-based point-contact transistor, was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. This led the way to more advanced digital computers. From the late 1940s, universities, the military, and businesses developed computer systems to digitally replicate and automate previously manually performed mathematical calculations, with the LEO being the first commercially available general-purpose computer. Digital communication became economical for widespread adoption after the invention of the personal computer in the 1970s. Claude Shannon, a Bell Labs mathematician, is generally credited with laying the foundations of digitalization in his pioneering 1948 article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication. In 1948, Bardeen and Brattain patented an insulated-gate transistor (IGFET) with an inversion layer. Their concept forms the basis of CMOS and DRAM technology today. In 1957, at Bell Labs, Frosch and Derick were able to manufacture planar silicon dioxide transistors, later a team at Bell Labs demonstrated a working MOSFET. The first integrated circuit milestone was achieved by Jack Kilby in 1958. Other important technological developments included the invention of the monolithic integrated circuit chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, made possible by the planar process developed by Jean Hoerni. In 1963, complementary MOS (CMOS) was developed by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor. The self-aligned gate transistor, which further facilitated mass production, was invented in 1966 by Robert Bower at Hughes Aircraft and independently by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein, and John Sarace at Bell Labs. In 1962, AT&T deployed the T-carrier for long-haul pulse-code modulation (PCM) digital voice transmission. The T1 format carried 24 pulse-code modulated, time-division multiplexed speech signals, each encoded in 64 kbit/s streams, leaving 8 kbit/s of framing information, which facilitated the synchronization and demultiplexing at the receiver. Over the subsequent decades, the digitisation of voice became the norm for all but the last mile (where analogue continued to be the norm right into the late 1990s). Following the development of MOS integrated circuit chips in the early 1960s, MOS chips reached higher transistor density and lower manufacturing costs than bipolar integrated circuits by 1964. MOS chips further increased in complexity at a rate predicted by Moore's law, leading to large-scale integration (LSI) with hundreds of transistors on a single MOS chip by the late 1960s. The application of MOS LSI chips to computing was the basis for the first microprocessors, as engineers began recognizing that a complete computer processor could be contained on a single MOS LSI chip. In 1968, Fairchild engineer Federico Faggin improved MOS technology with his development of the silicon-gate MOS chip, which he later used to develop the Intel 4004, the first single-chip microprocessor. It was released by Intel in 1971 and laid the foundations for the microcomputer revolution that began in the 1970s. MOS technology also led to the development of semiconductor image sensors suitable for digital cameras. The first such image sensor was the charge-coupled device, developed by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969, based on MOS capacitor technology. === 1969–1989: Invention of the internet, rise of home computers === The public was first introduced to the concepts that led to the Internet when a message was sent over the ARPANET in 1969. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. The Whole Earth movement of the 1960s advocated the use of new technology. In the 1970s, the home computer was introduced, time-sharing computers, the video game console, the first coin-op vide
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