Introduction: The Substitution of Human Faculties with Technology: Powered Machines The development of the steam engine in 1776 represented a major advance in the construction of powered machines and marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Powered engines and machines soon became common and led to the first extensive mechanization of manufacturing processes. The development of large-scale machine production on one hand decreased the demand for craftsmen and increased the demand for semiskilled and unskilled workers and on the other altered the nature of the work process from one mainly depending on physical power to one primarily dominated by technology.

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ARPAnet ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. Being an experimental network mainly serving the purpose to test the feasibility of wide area networks, the possibility of remote computing, it was created for resource sharing between research institutions, not for messaging services like E-mail. Although research was sponsored by US military, ARPAnet was not designed for directly martial use but to support military-related research. In 1969 ARPANET went online and links the first two computers, one of them located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute. But ARPAnet has not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972. Before it was decommissioned in 1990, NSFnet, a network of scientific and academic computers funded by the National Science Foundation, and a separate new military network went online in 1986. In 1988 the first private Internet service providers offered a general public access to NSFnet. Beginning in 1995, after having become the backbone of the Internet in the USA, NSFnet was turned over to a consortium of commercial backbone providers. This and the launch of the World Wide Web added to the success of the global data network we call the Net. In the USA commercial users already outnumbered military and academic users in 1994. Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.

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