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Techno-history

historical developments of the Internet and technology

historical developments of the Internet and technology

A Brief History of the Future

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

readable account of computer and Internet development

This is a fascinating history of the Internet – but given a personal spin. Journalist and academic John Naughton describes the technology of the digital revolution from a user’s point of view. What are the concerns of the average person? How does it all work? At each stage he explains the significance of each development. This approach will be very reassuring for beginners. A Brief History of the Future starts with potted biographies of Vannevar Bush, Norbert Weiner, and J.C.R Licklider as his version of ‘fathers of the Internet’, but it is Paul Baran and Vint Cerf who he tips as most important of all – because they came up with the ideas which pulled it all together.

A Brief History of the Future Naughton is good as explaining the details of the technology and engineering, and he puts his professional journalism skills to good use. Whenever necessary, he uses analogies with practical, everyday matters – such as packet-switching being like moving a house and its contents in separate trucks which take different routes to their destination, and then are re-assembled at the other end. He also writes amusingly about the pleasures and perils of email, and takes a refreshingly tolerant view on the issues of censorship and control.

There are some parts of the hard technical developments which he leaves out of his account – politely admitting that he has done so. This seems to me a wise choice, because the type of popular readership at which the book is aimed will welcome his focus on the personal achievements and his own enthusiastic account of engineering history.

Some of the other accounts of the Internet such as Hafner and Lyon’s Where Wizards Stay up Late and Robert Cringley’s Accidental Empires occasionally tax the non-specialist reader in this respect.

Like these other books, his narrative becomes chronologically scrambled at times, maybe because this reflects the disparate locations, enterprises, and time schemes [not to mention funding and government enterprises] involved in the enterprise. Naughton goes out of his way to be scrupulously fair to them all – including even monopolies such IT & T – which like British Telecom put a brake on the development of the Internet for a long time.

There is a particularly interesting chapter on the development of the UNIX operating system, and an explanation of how and why the Usenet News system evolved from it. He also provides interesting introductions to topics such the development of Linux and the Open Source movement which belives that software should be available free of charge.

He is at his best when describing the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web – perhaps because the story flows in an unbroken chronological sequence from Vannevar Bush, via Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson, through to Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesson. He ends with a brief glimpse at the current dangers of the commercialisation of the Net and the reasons why it is almost impossible to predict its future.

Naughton offers a very readable, humane, and contagiously enthusiastic account of the Net and its major features. This is a perfect book for anyone who wants to know the background to this major technological revolution.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet, London: Orion Books, 2000, pp.332, ISBN 075381093X


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Accidental Empires

June 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Amusing history of computers and the Internet

This book has two sub-titles: ‘The Triumph of the Nerds’ and ‘How the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions, battle foreign competition, and still can’t get a date’. You can see that Robert Cringely takes an irreverent attitude to his study of Internet history and computer development in the US. He looks at it in terms of business enterprise, scientific development, and as a collection of extraordinary and eccentric characters who were once skipping classes and are now running the shop.

Internet historyHis account is written in a breezy, amusing, self-deprecating style. He jumps around from one topic, one character sketch, and even one decade to another. One minute he’s tracing the history of software development, the next it’s business methods and biographical sketches of entrepreneurs. Much of his energy is spent on critiques of Chairman Bill and figures such as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

It’s a sort of history of how it all happened – but rendered via a cubist form of narrative in which you have to reassemble the chronology yourself. Cringley is a computer magazine gossip columnist, and I’m afraid that ultimately, it shows.

What he offers is popularised science, via sound-bite journalism: “it takes thirty years, more or less, to absorb a new information technology into daily life”. These little aphorisms are sometimes amusing, but they’re just as often slightly silly, as in the basic statements on which he bases his claims for the entire book.

First, that the Internet happened more or less by accident. Second, that the people who made it happen were amateurs. Neither claim is actually true, but it suits his purpose to amuse. However, the moment you stop to think about these propositions, they evaporate immediately.

cringely-3And yet for all that he takes a jokey line, he offers lots of interesting insights – such as the reasons why some software lasts, unlike hardware which on average is replaced every three years. It’s a shame, because he is clearly well informed and at some points has interesting things to say about technological developments and even the philosophy of the internet – but his efforts are dissipated by a lack of focus. He throws off ideas and sketches topics every few pages which warrant a book in themselves, but he can’t quite make up his mind if he’s a historian of technology or a commentator on business methods.

The last two chapters are a 1996 update [made for a successful TV adaption] in which he admits the rise to power of Microsoft – but this is more business management history than an account of technological development.

The good side of Cringeley’s approach is that he offers a bracingly irreverant account of the US computer business which might encourage readers to take a sceptical view and not be overawed by Big Names. The downside is that his analytic method is anecdotal, and hit-and-miss. There is here the beginning of what I think will eventually make a fascinating study – the history of software development. Perhaps he ought to get together with a disciplined co-author [or an editor with Iron Will] and he could produce something more coherent and persuasive.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Robert X Cringley, Accidental Empires, Addison-Wesley/Viking, 2nd edition, 1996, pp.358, ISBN 0140258264


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Being Digital

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

why computers are important – now and in the future

Nicholas Negroponte is professor of the Media Lab at MIT and an enthusiastic spokesman for the revolution in information technology. He writes regular columns in WIRED, which have been expanded to form this manifesto for the future of digitisation. The fundamental thesis he expounds in Being Digital is simple but profound. He suggests that the revolutionary state we now inhabit is one in which the ‘bit’ is to be distinguished from the ‘atom’.

Being DigitalThat is, information encoded and transmitted electronically in binary form needs no material existence, whereas its physical realisation in print, film stock, or VCR is earth-bound and cumbersome. The bit can be transmitted instantly, globally, and virtually cost-free, whereas its tangible version in atoms immediately requires physical production, distribution, and storage. The future, he claims, is digital.

In the course of a dozen and a half short chapters he covers just about every aspect of modern communications. Developments in data compression; the next stages in desktop publishing; how the television monitor and the PC will merge; ownership and intellectual property rights.

He is particularly interesting on multimedia, [whose origins he reveals in the Israeli attack on Entebbe airport!] CD- ROMs [described as “the Betamax of the 90s”] the historical development of GUIs, and the politics of those businesses which are busy buying up information for “repurposing”.

En passant he covers holography, teleconferencing, speech recognition, virtual reality, and howPCs will develop. There’s something here for everybody.

As far as Negroponte is concerned everything is bits. For with digitisation, any one medium becomes translatable into another. A book chapter is no different from a video clip once it has been transposed into binary code (except that it takes up less space). The future of PCs for writing he sees being affected by miniaturisation, touch-sensitive screens, and “intelligent agents” which will learn to interpret our demands. All this is delivered in a breathless telegraphic style (which I suppose befits his subject) and he is deliberately provocative and cryptic in a manner which suggests that many of his ideas could be developed further.

It’s easy to spot the contradiction that this electronic vision comes to us in a form which he wittily describes as “ink squeezed onto dead trees”. In fact the book is produced on paper of such poor quality that you can read the print on both sides at once. [It’s not clear if this is a high-tech device or an ironic comment from the publishers.] In addition, for someone extolling the transmission of data in milliseconds, Negroponte does a lot of travellers name-dropping. One wonders why he has to go traipsing round the globe so much when he could do business using Email. But he has tips for travellers: boycott those hotels which don’t let you plug your laptop straight into the wall.

The persuasiveness of what he has to say arises from his own first-hand experience. As someone who has been in the business of computers and multimedia since the 1960s [whilst Bill Gates was still at school] he is well informed about the history of its technology, frank in revealing the true ownership behind corporate names, and generous in attributing credit for the technical advances we all now take for granted. However, if you can steel yourself against his breathless rush, one or two of the arguments can be made to tremble a little with some applied clear thinking.

He supposes for instance that writers would earn more if their work were distributed digitally (smaller profits, bigger sales). But would you want to download then print off a 500 page book to avoid the publisher’s price-tag? (This is already possible from databases such as Project Gutenberg.) Why have your edition of Moby Dick on 600 loose sheets of A4 when Penguin will supply a bound copy for less than the price of a gin-and-tonic? Nevertheless, this is just one small idea amongst many that he throws off in a series of elegantly catenated chapters.

Others ideas might be more disturbing for those professionally engaged in existing forms of communication – but they make sense when measured against common experience. This is what he has to say about manuals for instance. “The notion of an instruction manual is obsolete. The fact that computer hardware and software manufacturers ship them with product is nothing short of perverse. The best instructor on how to use a machine is the machine itself.” This is bad news for technical writers, but do you really refer to that 900 page manual any more? Of course not: you just click on HELP.

This is a stimulating and thought-provoking book, and unless Negroponte has it all wrong (which seems doubtful) it will provide ideas for the rest of us to work with for many years to come. Anyone who wants a glimpse into the future should start here.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, London: Coronet, 1996, pp.249, ISBN 0340649305


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Blown to Bits

June 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

business strategies and the new technology

This book seeks to explain how technological developments are impacting in the world of eCommerce. We’ve all heard about the IT revolution, but where is it actually having an effect? Evans and Wurster start with the cautionary tale of Encyclopedia Britannica, whose business model was wrong-footed when Encarta was launched on CD. A strategy almost two hundred years old was overturned in the space of five years. You can now buy Britannica on disk for the price of a paperback book. The lesson is that it’s suicide to rest on your laurels when faced with new technology. Their second major point is what they call the playoff between ‘richness’ and ‘reach’.

Blown to BitsYou can either deliver information-rich data to a few people, or lightweight general ads to many. These appear to be mutually exclusive strategies – though Amazon manage to do both at the same time. They are essentially IT optimists, because they believe that access to information will promote more efficient competition. “the emergence of universal, open standards will … accelerate the demise of hierarchical structures and their proprietary information systems”. Whether this is true or not is still a matter for e-Commerce conjecture.

In the era of the IT revolution, the knowledge we need to enrich information is available to us all – free of charge. Therefore, as they argue, “Shifting the trade-off between richness and reach melts the informational glue that bonds business relationships”.

As you can see, you have to be prepared for a mode of expression which combines abstractions and the jargon of business and management studies:

This shaped the horizontally integrated multidivisional corporation, held together by a logic that transcended the business unit.

I’ve read that statement several times, but I still don’t know what it means. It’s hard to stick with this kind of opaque and abstract language. But if you can, it’s worth it – because they do deal with important general principles – though it’s a great relief when they occasionally come to discuss a practical example.

They look at newspapers and banking as examples of business models which are now vulnerable to the new technology. For instance, those people who use personal banking systems are small in percentage terms, but they are the richest, and account for 75% of banking profits. What does this mean? It means that banking is vulnerable to changes brought about by software engineering.

They explore that buzzword of the new e-Commerce – ‘disintermediation’ (the removal of the middle man) using the example of online shopping. Yet no sooner has the middleman gone than he comes back again as the ‘navigator’ – that is, somebody who acts as a guide and as an advisor amidst the plethora of choices available to the consumer.

The general lesson boils down to this. Access to information and the transforming power of new technology puts traditional business methods under threat: yet at the same time it opens up new possibilities for those wishing to take them.

This book has become a set text on an Open University technology course that I teach. The students find it hard going, but all of them in my group have grasped the ideas behind it – and finished the course with successful Web essays outlining eCommerce plans.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy, Boston (MA): Harvard Business School Press, 2000, pp.259, ISBN: 087584877X


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How the Web was Born

June 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Readable technological history of Internet and Web

Robert Cailliau’s name was on the original research proposal for the World Wide Web, along with Tim Berners-Lee. This is his account of the development, written with James Gilles. They start with a quick history of the Internet, focussing on the key feature of packet-switching which made the Web possible. Part two switches to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva. Here the story becomes one of scientists from all over the world who need to share, archive, and retrieve information. CERN had developed its own Intranet, and by the late 1980s had become Europe’s biggest Internet site.

world wide webAs with most accounts of Internet history, you have to keep up with a complex chronology as the separate stories of each technological strand are developed: the TCP/IP protocols; the development of the PC; and the HCI (human computer interface). Fortunately, all technical terms are explained, and the general reader will be grateful for the appendices which include a timeline, a list of key individuals, a bibliography, an explanation of acronyms, and of course an index.

They include character sketches of all the main figures – Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Engelbert, who first thought of Windows, hypertext, and the mouse respectively.

There’s an interesting chapter on the rapid rise and fall of the UK computer industry which in the early 1980s was producing the world’s highest per-capita ownership of personal computers.

They also include potted histories of hypertext, and the pre-web search software such as Archie, WAIS, and Gopher. People who have used these command-line interfaces are likely to look back and smile fondly.

Finally, after all the preliminaries, everything is set for what was to be the killer application of the Internet – the invention of the World Wide Web.

It’s still amazing to think how recent all this has been – only ten years ago – as this second edition of their book is issued on the Web’s birthday.

If you want a history of the Web which is more general than Tim Berners-Lee’s more personal account in Weaving the Web, this is an excellent alternative.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web was Born, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p.372, ISBN 0192862073


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Language, Technology, and Society

May 28, 2010 by Roy Johnson

how technology interacts with speaking and writing

Most people think that writing and speaking a language are more or less the same thing – that writing is speech transcribed onto paper. The fact is that they are two different (though closely related) systems, and writing is an abstract system of symbols for representing the spoken language. There are some languages which are spoken but which have no written equivalents, and there are some languages (computer code for instance) which are never likely to be spoken. Richard Sproat in this wide-ranging study Language, Technology, and Society emphasises from the start that the most important connection between speech and the written language is the technological invention of writing. He takes the radical line that most written languages have built into them a strong element of encoding the sound of the language – including even Chinese, which many people imagine to be entirely ideographic.

Language, Technology, and SocietyHe examines a number of languages – Arabic, Chinese, Phoenician, Egyptian – to demonstrate that they have this thing in common, even though some are written without vowel sounds, and some are written right-to-left in sequence. Next he covers the issue of decipherment – how we can understand ancient inscriptions such as the Rosetta Stone and Linear B. The examples he looks at add up to further evidence that even apparently ideographic languages such as Egyptian hieroglyphics were not properly decoded until it was recognised that they recorded the sound of a spoken language – even if improperly, and mixed with symbols and ideograms.

In a chapter on literacy he demonstrates fairly convincingly that the relative complexity of the writing system has little or no relation to rates of literacy. Chinese and Japanese children have to learn thousands of symbols representing the words and concepts in their language, as against the twenty-six or so letters learned by children in most western European languages.

it is remarkably simple to make the case that literacy is a product of economics and indeed, has little or nothing to do with the complexity of the writing system in use in a country.

To raise standards of literacy in a society, ‘all’ that’s required is to raise the living standards of its inhabitants.

There’s a chapter on the history of the typewriter – a technological phase which was quite short lived, but which has left us with the legacy of the QWERTY keyboard layout. Despite the fact that alternatives to this have been invented, QWERTY has prevailed, largely he argues, because it is quite good ergonomically.

He finishes with two chapters which are clearly dealing with his own specialism: (he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories for eighteen years. The first of these is on speech recognition technology, and the second on machine translation (MT) which he argues has come a long way since it first began during the Cold War. But it still has a long way to go, as even Google will demonstrate if you ask it to translate a web page into a second language you understand.

There’s a full academic apparatus of endnotes, glossary, bibliography and annotated suggestions further reading, yet I was rather surprised that throughout the whole of this very thorough study he made no reference to some of the seminal texts on the relationship between language writing and technology. For these you will need to move on to Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Henri-Jean Martin’s The History and the Power of Writing, and Jay Bolter’s Writing Space.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Richard Sproat, Language, Technology, and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.286, ISBN: 0199549389


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Nerds 2.0.1 – A Brief History of the Internet

June 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Internet HistoryTV programmes of interviews with Internet personalities

Robert Cringely’s Triumph of the Nerds won legions of computer-skeptical and computer-naive viewers with its mix of minutiae and hip techniques. Going one step further into the digital maze, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet operates as a sequel of sorts to the surprise docu-hit. Just as its precursor chronicled the rise of empires built on computer software, Nerds 2.0.1 collects interviews from key players in the development of the Internet.

Fashionably hip in its visual feel, the film begins by amassing data on the net’s crowning, collaborative irony: conceived in the Pentagon during the counterculture’s smokiest high point by members–dare it be said–of the military industrial complex, the Net developed on the axis of university research networks and Deadhead (as in the Grateful Dead) electronic bulletin boards.

Much of the rest has become history, but Internet and computer industry pundit Robert X. Cringley makes the narrative a jumping, attractive embrace of being a nerd. Interviews with Bill Gates, Mark Andreesen, and Steve Case make these three hours (three tapes slipcased in a nice box) fly by.

This video series is an excellent addition to the material available on computer history. It moves at a fast pace and provides interviews with many of the key people in the industry. It does not cover every aspect of computer history, but it does fill in some gaps that other references missed. I encourage anyone interested in computer history to add this video series to their library. Excellent footage, nicely put together.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Robert X Cringley, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet, VHS Video (3 tapes) ASIN: 6305128235


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Release 2.1

June 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

social, moral, and political issues raised by the Internet

Esther Dyson is renowned for her digital savvy and is much syndicated as a sybil of cyberculture. She aims to bring us all out of the dark ages into the Brave New World of the digital age. This compilation is the hardback version of her electronic mailing list – Release 1.0. It’s a populist text aimed at the ‘beginner’ and the small businessman, which addresses general topics such as communities, work, education, Net governance, intellectual property rights, and privacy. Her purpose is to reveal how information technology is affecting all aspects of our lives.

esther dysonHer approach is to pose questions – ‘What is the right size for a [Net] community?’ or ‘What kinds of investment can one make in a community?’ This appears to be a communicative and intelligent approach to discussing problems of the Net, but when you begin to think about it these are actually non-questions. What’s more they are followed by non-answers, and these in turn are followed by non-predictions. For instance, “Those who succeed will be those who are good at getting their new designs or themselves noticed”. When was this ever not the case, one wonders?

She poses too much of her argument as speculation and questions about what might be the case, what could be – not what is the case.

On the subject of employment she speaks of people working in ‘co-operative teams’ and paints an almost ridiculously rosy picture of commercial life – completely ignoring the nasty and competitive side of work, even though she’s part of it. At one point she gives something of the game away by casually mentioning that part of her brief is to advise companies on ‘which people to fire’.

It’s the same when it comes to education. She sets up Utopian notions of teachers emailing parents to discuss students’ progress – but then pulls them down again with finger-wagging paragraphs of caution. The result is dampening and very, very conservative. She warns us: ‘Kids can find one another, talk about their parents – or drugs or sex – in a medium inaccessible to many parents and teachers’. She assumes that this is a Bad Thing and ignores the fact that they could do this just by talking to each other, either on the telephone or even in the playground. On this score, she’s the Norman Rockwell of the Net:

Your English teacher does more than force you to read and discuss novels. He encourages you to think; you’re eager to win his approval and so you work a little harder, think a little longer…you kind of like him…and he’s … well, he’s a role model.

On Net governance she’s a little more objective, and less dewy-eyed, if rather descriptive. There’s not much here that most Net enthusiasts won’t already know. She deals interestingly with Spam – but it’s difficult to repress a sneaky suspicion that she doesn’t know much about the technicalities involved. In technical terms for instance, she doesn’t make any clear distinctions between email, the Web, newsgroups, mailing lists, and FTP – it’s all called ‘the Net’. Her generalizations look shallow compared with the impressive close-reading skills that are common amongst analysts of message headers in on-line groups.

A chapter on privacy deals with the right of consumers to protect themselves against cookies. She argues that consumers should have choice and be able to trade information about themselves with agencies who reveal up front what they will do with the information. On these issues she takes a reasonable and libertarian position, and the answer to all these issues that she offers is sensible: maximum transparency.

As we draw nearer to the world of business in the section on copyright she seems to be on firmer ground – but still doesn’t supply the sort of detailed evidence which would demonstrate intellectual rigour and make her suggestions more convincing. Unfortunately, it’s not long before the Net disappears more or less altogether and we’re in the world of advertising and PR consultancy where she obviously feels at home.

This compilation of market-speak reaches its nadir in a section on the organisation of conferences where people pay steep fees for the privilege of rubbing shoulders with self-elected experts. This might be where she makes her money, but it has very little to do with ‘living in the digital age’, and she seems unaware of the contradiction between assembling people at conference centres and preaching the advantages of digital technology.

She comes up with completely unconvincing arguments about ‘the need to be there’ at these events and even descends to enthusing about the marketing opportunities for spin-off T-shirts! Just imagine – all those keynote speeches could be zipped into a 50K text file and made available the day they were written. Instead, people traipse half way across a continent, dragging their atoms to a conference centre for two or three day’s expense-account junketing. But this is what keeps her in business.

There’s rather a lot of first person address which at times comes close to egomania: “Central and Eastern Europe needed me” and “a group of ‘big thinkers’ (including me)”. But for somebody who seems to be well connected in the commercial world and who drops hints about her investments, there is remarkably little here about hard finance. Her arguments are vague political wish-fulfilments peppered with occasional anecdotes [I met a man once who said…] and all the time, the really exhilarating developments on the Net go unexamined.

If you think this is a harsh judgement, remember that this is a woman who has founded a business empire and is syndicated world-wide as a futurist and guru of the digital world: and for someone offering advice on the bleeding edge of technological developments, it is a little disconcerting to see occasional practical examples pop up, only to be left behind, unexamined.

There is a reasonable index, only very rare references to sources, no bibliography, and a short list of URLs is not annotated in any way. All this suggest that she is not in the habit of scrutinising her claims carefully – and keep in mind that she makes her living by selling advice to other people. She might have an impressive track record as an investment analyst, but on the strength of this, I don’t think I would take her technological advice on which brand of floppy disk to buy.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Esther Dyson, Release 2.1: A design for living in the digital age, London: Viking, 1997, pp.307, ISBN: 0670876003


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The Computer and the Information Revolution

June 28, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the history of mathematics + technology = computers

This is book which gets mentioned in any serious history of computers. It’s a study of the mathematical, mechanical, and then the electronic developments which led to the creation of modern computers. The first part of The Computer and the Information Revolution offers an account of the development of mathematical systems, ending with the creation of binary notation in the nineteenth century. This paves the way for part two, which is a history of automatic calculation – first by mechanical devices, then by electronic means. It’s a book dense with a sense of history, and Ifrah’s span reaches effortlessly from 3500 BCE (Before the Common Era) to the maths underlying computer technology in the post-war years.

The Computer and the Information RevolutionHis approach can sometimes be a little disconcerting. One minute we’re in ancient Greece, next in the eighteenth century. A more smoothly integrated chronological narrative would have strengthened his case, just as more pictures and diagrams would have spared him page-length descriptions of the machines he discusses. This is a book which is crying out for illustrations.

However, he more than makes up for this in his wide-ranging inclusiveness. Even small-scale and failed inventors are mentioned. He is particularly good at explaining the relationship between mathematical theory and what was technologically possible at any given point. He points out that there are big gaps in the development of information technology – very often caused by the absence of nought/null in the numbering system.

It’s an odd book, because the translator and editor fills in what he clearly regards as important gaps in the author’s knowledge, and the chronology is patchy too. There’s a lot of back-tracking to make up for a lack of continuous narrative.

However, his account gains a great deal of impetus as all strands converge for the creation of the first modern computers. His description of Alan Turing’s conceptual breakthrough in 1936 and his relationship to John Van Neumann’s idea for a program stored in memory become positively gripping.

In fact it’s a shame he doesn’t stick with his theme once computers had been built, because the latter part of the book spins off into cosmology, genetics, and a mosaic of reflections on culture,science, and ‘the future of mankind’. Nevertheless, for anyone remotely interested in the development of information technology, this is a book which should not be missed.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Georges Ifrah, The Computer and the Information Revolution, trans E.F.Harding, London: Harvill, 2000, pp.410, ISBN 1860467385


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Filed Under: Techno-history Tagged With: Computers, Information architecture, Mathematics, Technological history, Technology, The Computer and the Information Revolution, Theory

The Myths of Innovation

May 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new developments in technology, science, and business

This is a book which seeks to de-bunk the myths of invention. Most of us are brought up to believe that Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head, and that Archimedes had a ‘Eureka!’ moment in his bath. Scott Berkun points out that neither of these two myths is true, and that almost all technical innovations come about as a result of years and years of research, failed attempts, and lots of hard work. He also points out that history is not only written by the victors, but that it commonly misses out the failures, wastes, and losses that go to make up a success. His telling example here is Rome, whose architectural glories are actually built on the ruins of a city that was previously burned to the ground.

The Myths of InnovationOnce these myths are out of the way, he looks at how innovations do come about, and wonders if there is any way of planning for them or creating systems that will encourage them. No matter how much we might wish there were, his answer is ‘It can’t be done’ in both cases.

In fact the more he looks at real-life examples, the more it becomes apparent that perfectly good innovations can fail for lack of appreciation, audience, funding, and a host of other reasons. When he looks closely at the provenance of success stories it’s obvious that they must

  • not be too far ahead of their time
  • fit within existing sets of beliefs
  • be simple to adopt
  • meet an existing need

As he puts it in one of his many amusing examples, if free mobile phones had mysteriously appeared in 9th century England, they would have been burned as witches’ eggs.

The World Wide Web, the medium through which we all live and breathe, was invented by Tim Berners-Lee because he couldn’t remember where his colleagues’ research papers were located. So he devised a simple coding system (HTML) which allowed documents to be tagged. A Eureka moment? No – because look what was already in place, on which this system ran.

First there had been the invention of the computer roughly fifty years before – at Manchester University, where Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein were both members of staff. There had already been established a world-wide network of computer connections (ARPANET). Packet-switching (the unsung gem of communication technology) had recently been invented. And the personal computer with its attendant gizmos of mouse, screen, and keyboard had been developed. You get the point: the Web and HTML was an amazing development which has changed all our lives – (and I still don’t know why Berners-Lee hasn’t been given a Nobel Prize, if Winston Churchill can have one for literature). But the Web was built on lots of other inventions, and it came at the right time.

The book dips slightly in the middle when he looks at the (largely negative) effect managers have on innovations and efficiency, but true to the theories he is propounding, he pulls some positive lessons out of the exploration.

Then towards the end of the book he looks at the social and political results of major innovations. Unsurprisingly, these turn out to be wholly ambiguous. Motor cars liberate people to travel wherever they wish, but they also pollute the atmosphere and kill people in their hundreds of thousands every year. DDT helped to control typhus and malaria, but it got into the lower species’ food chain and caused havoc. Einstein’s theories revolutionised cosmology, but also led to the development of the atomic bomb.

This summary makes it all sound rather negative. But his overall message is not so. He merely wants us to realise that the world is a messier place than we often realise; that we shouldn’t accept the over-simplified stories we are fed – even about successful inventions; and that what we regard as somebody’s ‘breakthrough moment’ might to them be the end of a lifetime’s slog.

It’s also a very readable book – the first I have ever come across in which the technical colophon was the funniest part.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.178, ISBN: 0596527055


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Filed Under: Techno-history Tagged With: Cultural history, Invention, Myths of Innovation, Technology, Theory

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