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When did the information age begin?
In the beginning were the trees and the sky. The ground was a long way down and we
exercised a great deal of care to insure we did not fall. Our needs were simple and our wants
were few. Food, water, sex, and status dominated our thoughts and a few grunts were
generally ample to convey our desires. Danger was of little concern except at the watering
hole. Those who sought to eat us were consigned to the ground and thus for the most part,
far away.
Times changed and the trees began to die off. Now we are living in the grasslands and must
use all our wits to survive. The lions and hyenas have discovered how tasty we are and how
slowly we run. The grass is high and we must stand up to survey our surroundings. We
begin to develop a sophisticated vocabulary to communicate these new dangers along with
the original four desires, food, water, sex, and status. We must teach our young how to
survive in this hostile new world of grass. The trees are a distant memory. The lions are real.
We have been using some form of communication to pass information since life began on
earth some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. Mammals appeared about 220 million years ago.
Our hominid ancestors appeared 2-6 million years ago and we ourselves are only 200,000 to
400,000 years old. Human language appeared approximately 50,000 to 100,000 years ago
and non-pictorial written language appeared only about 5,500 years ago.
Not much really happened in the ensuing 5,000 years other than a few wars, conquests, and
crusades. In the West, Ptolemy and Plato ruled the minds of men and the church tended to
frown on any substantial mode of inquiry they did not control. Books came into existence and
the spread of knowledge and dogma began. Things did not really heat up until Gutenberg
invented the printing press in 1450. Suddenly, knowledge became available to mere mortals.
Copernicus began to argue that the Earth was not the center of the universe and the
scientific theory began to grow in earnest. The church did not like this at all. For 500 years,
a war against information raged.
Then in the 1950s, post WWII America began her epic run. The first phototypesetting
presses appeared. Concurrently, the radio and the new fangled television were rapidly
becoming household appliances and the already venerable vacuum tube was being
threatened by some kind of weird thing called a transistor. What in creation is a semi-
conductor? The world was about to find out.
The transistor made its debut in 1948 at the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Suddenly,
communication devices could be made much smaller and even portable with battery power
providing adequate useful capacity. Radios and Televisions began to spread like wildfire. In
the 1960s, a strange calculating machine called an electronic digital computer was beginning
to crawl out of the research labs and into the mundane world. A four function electronic
calculator of the period, cost about the same as a decent used car.
Then in the late 1960s, the integrated circuit was created by jamming a bunch of transistors
and other interconnected components onto a single substrate. The age of integrated
electronics was born. Things really began to zoom. Integrated circuits were appearing in
everything from coffee makers to space ships. We began building gigantic mainframe
computers with hundreds and even thousands of terminals. The U.S. military and the
research labs at universities began devising ways to communicate between computers
hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Research scientists and the military built the
network structure that eventually became the internet and the world wide web, the greatest
repository of useful information and garbage in the history of humankind. Library and landfill
in one easy stop. The Internet is a true reflection of our collective selves.
At the same time wireless telephony was developing using highly integrated components and
cellular radio technology. People were getting directions to the dinner party while en-route.
Satellites were launched into various orbits around the earth. People could receive literally
hundreds of television channels from stations all over the planet bringing worldwide news to
people, some of which had never left their hometown. Needless to say, this scared the living
daylights out of many of the idyllic 1950s crowd. Suddenly the world was a very big and
scary place. GPS came into being, people with these amazing gadgets are never lost. Ok, I
guess that is stretching it, they are sort of never lost. We have real time reporting of events
and as we are all becoming so painfully aware, digital still and movie cameras are
everywhere.
Governments around the world are currently grappling with this chimera. They are being
pressed from all sides to create laws and treaties to allow these diverse electronic
communication webs to exist while still maintaining law and order. For the most part, the
churches are running around with their hands in the air crying the sky is falling, the sky is
falling. As they have in fact since their respective inceptions.
The reality of this apparently totally confused time is that we are living in one of the greatest
times in history. Confucius said, "May you live in interesting times". Theses are interesting
times indeed.
I couldn’t come up with a close, so I included all three.
So, if you ask me, then I say the Information Age really began when the first self replicating
compounds appeared on some nameless planet in some unknown galaxy somewhere in this
universe.
Or:
So, if you ask me, then I say the Information Age really began around 1450 in Mainz Germany
when some unidentified extra-terrestrials zapped the brain of Herr Johannes Gutenberg.
Or:
So, if you ask me, then I say the Information Age really began in 1948 in a New Jersey U.S.A.
laboratory when some other unidentified extra-terrestrials (probably XPETE and XMIKE)
zapped the brains of Messrs. Walter Houser Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Bradford
Shockley
I suppose it just follows an asymptotic curve. Similar to the one I just threw you.
;-)
S’agapo,
Ioanni
1012 Words
In the beginning were the trees and the sky. The ground was a long way down and we
exercised a great deal of care to insure we did not fall. Our needs were simple and our wants
were few. Food, water, sex, and status dominated our thoughts and a few grunts were
generally ample to convey our desires. Danger was of little concern except at the watering
hole. Those who sought to eat us were consigned to the ground and thus for the most part,
far away.
Times changed and the trees began to die off. Now we are living in the grasslands and must
use all our wits to survive. The lions and hyenas have discovered how tasty we are and how
slowly we run. The grass is high and we must stand up to survey our surroundings. We
begin to develop a sophisticated vocabulary to communicate these new dangers along with
the original four desires, food, water, sex, and status. We must teach our young how to
survive in this hostile new world of grass. The trees are a distant memory. The lions are real.
We have been using some form of communication to pass information since life began on
earth some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. Mammals appeared about 220 million years ago.
Our hominid ancestors appeared 2-6 million years ago and we ourselves are only 200,000 to
400,000 years old. Human language appeared approximately 50,000 to 100,000 years ago
and non-pictorial written language appeared only about 5,500 years ago.
Not much really happened in the ensuing 5,000 years other than a few wars, conquests, and
crusades. In the West, Ptolemy and Plato ruled the minds of men and the church tended to
frown on any substantial mode of inquiry they did not control. Books came into existence and
the spread of knowledge and dogma began. Things did not really heat up until Gutenberg
invented the printing press in 1450. Suddenly, knowledge became available to mere mortals.
Copernicus began to argue that the Earth was not the center of the universe and the
scientific theory began to grow in earnest. The church did not like this at all. For 500 years,
a war against information raged.
Then in the 1950s, post WWII America began her epic run. The first phototypesetting
presses appeared. Concurrently, the radio and the new fangled television were rapidly
becoming household appliances and the already venerable vacuum tube was being
threatened by some kind of weird thing called a transistor. What in creation is a semi-
conductor? The world was about to find out.
The transistor made its debut in 1948 at the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Suddenly,
communication devices could be made much smaller and even portable with battery power
providing adequate useful capacity. Radios and Televisions began to spread like wildfire. In
the 1960s, a strange calculating machine called an electronic digital computer was beginning
to crawl out of the research labs and into the mundane world. A four function electronic
calculator of the period, cost about the same as a decent used car.
Then in the late 1960s, the integrated circuit was created by jamming a bunch of transistors
and other interconnected components onto a single substrate. The age of integrated
electronics was born. Things really began to zoom. Integrated circuits were appearing in
everything from coffee makers to space ships. We began building gigantic mainframe
computers with hundreds and even thousands of terminals. The U.S. military and the
research labs at universities began devising ways to communicate between computers
hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Research scientists and the military built the
network structure that eventually became the internet and the world wide web, the greatest
repository of useful information and garbage in the history of humankind. Library and landfill
in one easy stop. The Internet is a true reflection of our collective selves.
At the same time wireless telephony was developing using highly integrated components and
cellular radio technology. People were getting directions to the dinner party while en-route.
Satellites were launched into various orbits around the earth. People could receive literally
hundreds of television channels from stations all over the planet bringing worldwide news to
people, some of which had never left their hometown. Needless to say, this scared the living
daylights out of many of the idyllic 1950s crowd. Suddenly the world was a very big and
scary place. GPS came into being, people with these amazing gadgets are never lost. Ok, I
guess that is stretching it, they are sort of never lost. We have real time reporting of events
and as we are all becoming so painfully aware, digital still and movie cameras are
everywhere.
Governments around the world are currently grappling with this chimera. They are being
pressed from all sides to create laws and treaties to allow these diverse electronic
communication webs to exist while still maintaining law and order. For the most part, the
churches are running around with their hands in the air crying the sky is falling, the sky is
falling. As they have in fact since their respective inceptions.
The reality of this apparently totally confused time is that we are living in one of the greatest
times in history. Confucius said, "May you live in interesting times". Theses are interesting
times indeed.
I couldn’t come up with a close, so I included all three.
So, if you ask me, then I say the Information Age really began when the first self replicating
compounds appeared on some nameless planet in some unknown galaxy somewhere in this
universe.
Or:
So, if you ask me, then I say the Information Age really began around 1450 in Mainz Germany
when some unidentified extra-terrestrials zapped the brain of Herr Johannes Gutenberg.
Or:
So, if you ask me, then I say the Information Age really began in 1948 in a New Jersey U.S.A.
laboratory when some other unidentified extra-terrestrials (probably XPETE and XMIKE)
zapped the brains of Messrs. Walter Houser Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Bradford
Shockley
I suppose it just follows an asymptotic curve. Similar to the one I just threw you.
;-)
S’agapo,
Ioanni
1012 Words