The journey to today’s digital world wasn’t a straight line of technical breakthroughs, it was a layered creative process shaped by social needs, cultural shifts, and a small number of visionaries who imagined futures most people couldn’t see yet. To answer this question, I wanted to experiment with AI’s capabilities to expain something complex like this in simpler terms! I prompted Chat GPT with this same question but asked the model to explain the answer to me as if I were just 10 years old and got an interesting response. It helped me to better understand the topic! Response with pieces from AI:

In the early 1900’s math took forver, messages, traveled slowly, and information way hard to find becvaue everything we did was analog. Visonaries wondered what would happen if they could build machines that could help them think and remember things. They began by building simple machines that could count! 

They broke big probelms down into tiny steps and taught machines a simple lanuage, off or on, 1s or 0s. Then they connected these machines together, once computeres could “talk” to eachother the internet was born! Around this time lots of big wars were going on in the world. This prompted scientists and engineers to invent these machines that could talk to eachothr and could take big problems and make them simple enough to understand and communicate to others. After these wars the governments wanted machines that could do math quickly, communicate, and help plan things so they enlistend those scientists and engineers to help.