History Of Computer Technology Research Articles

A Technocratic Machine: The Memex as Rhetorical Invention

Abstract The Memex is an icon in the history of computer technology. It was first presented to the public in a 1945 Life Magazine article as “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” The Memex itself was never built, but the image of what machines like it could do captured the imagination of a generation of computer engineers. The Memex was designed by an engineer and science administrator named Vannevar Bush, but he had actually designed the Memex to address inter-war America: the Memex article was written during the tumult of the late 1930s and largely untouched during World War II. This article examines the Memex within this interwar context, paying particular attention to how Bush used the design of a technological prototype to imagine how machines could help humans navigate the modern world. I argue that this effort was an act of rhetorical invention and show that the design of the Memex was a vehicle for Bush to endorse technocratic authority over American life.

Real Time/Zero Time

Like hard-core pornography, about which U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart notoriously said, know it when I see it, the phrase may be much easier to spot than to define.1 What digital media scholars see as evidence of real time-the copresence, for instance, of an event and its live stream on the Web-is different from what computer scientists refer to when they talk about real-time computing, which is a system's mission-critical aspect: for example, an air bag inflates before a driver is thrown through the windshield. Or consider the phrase itself: real time is not real-time or realtime; the noun refers to a certain temporality, while the adjective form can refer to speed, rate of change, or interactivity; real time can be a synonym for virtuality, or even its putative opposite, realness.The trouble with real time is not the proliferation of definitions, which should be welcomed; the trouble is that we too often confuse real time with the medium that manifests it. Whereas digital media scholars see real time as synonymous with the temporality of computer networks, television scholars might see real time in terms of the liveness of television broadcasts, while film scholars may find it in the moving image's seeming continuity, a motion simulated twenty-four frames a second. This leads to confusion between cause and effect. Consider, for example, art historian Michael Newman, who invokes the term when writing of the ethical stakes of analog cinema in the face of digitization. For Newman, digital technology leaves in its wake interchangeable media in the simultaneity of time.2 The words he uses to discuss the regime of the digital are striking, because 'real' aptly describes the very thing he opposes to digital media: analog cinema.Quoting a character of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who exclaims that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, Mary Ann Doane has suggested that electricity produced instantaneity roughly a hundred years before digital technologies such as the Internet.3 In her investigation of films such as the Execution of Czolgosz (1901), in which bodies were burned with electricity and other stimuli, she notes that electricity generates a virtually instantaneous bodily response-the nerve of the world. By annihilating delay, electricity tied together the globe, producing its own global simultaneity.4 Electricity also pointed to the delay or dead that occurs between action and response in everyday life. Doane uses this idea to argue that structuring time through narrative and editing, cinema achieves a maximum reduction of wasted time, a time' that is much more than 'real time' itself.5 In other words, a hundred years before Newman's critique of simultaneity, cinema too was billed as global, simultaneous, a medium that annihilated all earlier forms of media.What my example suggests is that real time may at the present moment be synonymous with digital technology, but the term is much more malleable; it has a way of adhering to the latest technology. Within the history of computer technology, the effort to locate the earliest moment of real time often results in ever more diffuse examples. We know that real-time technologies came largely out of the of war; we know, for instance, that the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system, deployed in 1958 to track incoming Soviet bombers, was the first computer system that offered the ability to interact with the screen in real time and led to the first real-time business applications.6 The phrase is first used inj. P. Eckert's 1946 description of a digital time' computing machine that might replace analog (or true) computing machines in gun positioning, missile guidance, flight simulation, and industrial control.7 Eckert limits himself to four applications, because analog devices would have been considered more suitable for real-time applications than their cumbersome digital terparts. …

The age of computation is yet to come

The theory of classical universal computation was laid down in 1936, was implemented within a decade, became commercial within another decade, and dominated the world's economy half a century later. This success story relied on the progress in technology. As computers become faster they must become smaller. The history of computer technology has involved a sequence of changes from one type of physical realisation to another, with smaller and smaller components. The unavoidable step to the quantum level will be one in this sequence; but it promises something more exciting as well. It can support entirely new modes of computation that do not have classical analogues. There is so much potential in this fundamentally new way of harnessing nature that it appears as though the age of computation has not yet even begun!

Neural computation in urology: an orientation.

Neural computation is a field in which mathematical models are derived from algorithms based loosely on the physiological function of the biological neuron. This paper serves as an introduction to those that follow in this issue of Molecular Urology, which describe actual applications of neural computational modeling in the urologic domain. In this introductory paper, the history of computer technology and the foundations of neural computation are discussed. Methods of determining the accuracy of computation models are reviewed, and a statistical method of evaluating the significance of individual input features to the model's output, a process known as "feature extraction," is presented. Resources that provide free and commercial neural computational programs are cited for those readers interested in applying this technology to their own datasets, and a brief description of the author's neural computational programming environment is included. Finally, deployment of computational models via the Internet and various computer platforms is discussed.

The Impact of the Telegraph on Contract Law by Lester G. Lindley

628 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE secondary works (e.g., Michael R. Williams’s A History of Computing Technology and Shoshana Zuboff’s In the Age ofthe Smart Machine). The events or technologies he emphasizes sometimes seem randomly chosen. More troubling, however, is his naive, deterministic, and optimistic understanding of relationships between technology and its political, economic, and cultural setting. For example, he attributes the information revolution “to a single cause: the spectacular techno­ logical advances produced following the post-war development of the computer” (p. 34) and states that “ever since the discovery by Samuel Morse that the alphabet could be represented by a series of dots and dashes, digital transmission was destined to culminate in an integrated digital network—the ISDN” (p. 293). Near the end of the book he provides an uncritical paean to technology: “Traditional human skills of communication and craftsmanship have always benefitted from the technological advances achieved throughout history” (p. 299). Those interested in understanding recent developments in com­ puters and telecommunications may find the book somewhat more useful than historians will. Occasionally, Saxby provides interesting insights into legal issues and standards battles. Moreover, on some topics he provides much information about the contemporary British markets (though his shifts of focus between British and world markets often seem random). But readers should beware of taking his accounts even of contemporary events uncritically. For example, the book gives the impression that the original IBM personal computer did not have much effect on the market. It also ignores the recent polarization of the personal computer market between IBM (and compatibles) with DOS and Apple’s Macintosh with its graphical interface. Finally, the book’s abysmal copyediting and design (presum­ ably by the original British publisher, Macmillan Press) are a source of great annoyance. All in all, The Age of Information is not a major contribution to our understanding of the information age. JoAnne Yates Dr. Yates, associate professor of management communication in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, studies the historical evolution and contemporary role of communication and information genres and technologies in American firms. She has published Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). The Impact of the Telegraph on Contract Law. By Lester G. Lindley. New York: Garland, 1990. Pp. ix + 269; notes. $57.00. Despite its title, this book offers only a tantalizing glimpse of the telegraph’s impact on the law. After some fascinating chapters on telegraph companies’ liability for garbled messages, the book drops discussion of the telegraph altogether. Accordingly, historians of TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 629 technology will find half the book useful; all readers, including the legal and constitutional historians for whom it is primarily intended, will find the book’s conception and structure seriously flawed. Lester G. Lindley divides his book into two parts, the first on liability for mistransmitted telegraph messages and the second on work-injury law. These seemingly disparate areas of law, he argues, illustrate how the legal system promoted development in the 19th century and only belatedly checked some of industrialization’s unto­ ward consequences. Both legal issues turned on the question of liability. He finds that 19th-century law generally preferred to avoid assigning liability because such precedents would have threatened commercial development. And, even in the early 20th century, the legal system often spared individual firms by socializing losses through insurance. In his most original contribution, Lindley explores how the imper­ fect technology of sending messages by wire occasioned a legal reexamination of carriers’ liability. Early liability cases arose from “misplaced dots and unwanted spaces” (p. 31) in messages that caused financial loss. Later claims also involved “psychic losses”—miscommunicated news of a loved one’s death, for instance. Unfortunately, Lindley never discusses these. Lindley explains how telegraph entrepreneurs responded to claims for losses in two ways. One, the assumption of strict liability, stemmed from established common-carrier law. A minority of telegraph com­ panies argued that the industry would fare best if it promised customers high standards of service and assumed the cost when it failed to meet them. The prevailing view, however, was that inevitable errors...

The Age of Information: The Past Development and Future Significance of Computing and Communications by Stephen Saxby

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 627 used even by fairly mediocre designers. A narrow set-theoretical structure forces Mitchell into such formulations as “good design is a subset of feasible design, which in turn is a subset of consistent design.” What about visionary designs that are not feasible? What about works that seek contradiction? Architecture is seriously impov­ erished by this approach. Sergio L. Sanabria Dr. Sanabria teaches in the Department of Architecture at Miami University. The Age of Information: The Past Development and Future Significance of Computing and Communications. By Stephen Saxby. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Pp. x + 322; notes, bibliography, in­ dex. $40.00. By now, we all know that we live in the information age. Explaining both the origins and the significance of that information age and the technologies supporting it is a worthy but ambitious goal. Thus, The Age of Information's failure to deliver on the promise of its subtitle is not surprising. While Stephen Saxby, a British specialist in computer and telecommunications law, provides a great deal of information in a single, relatively short volume, his history and his prognostications are marred by naïveté and selectiveness. The book’s opening chapter provides a broad but brieflook at some of the philosophical, mathematical, economic, and legal issues raised by information and its use, then attempts to set communication and information in a historical, cultural, and scientific context. The next two chapters provide more historical perspective. The first of these traces previous revolutions in information technology, focusing on books as the principal past development in recording and communi­ cating information and on the postal system, telegraph, telephone, and radio as principal developments in personal and business com­ munications. The subsequent historical chapter considers the prehis­ tory and history of the computer itself, beginning with the mathemat­ ics of Newton and Leibniz and ending with microcomputers and D-RAM memory chips. In between, it considers early pioneers such as Charles Babbage and Herman Hollerith; the early big computers, including ENIAC, UNIVAC, and early IBM mainframes; and the development of several generations of programming languages. The final three chapters consider the recent history of computer hard­ ware, computer software, and telecommunications. Although Saxby deserves some credit for providing historical perspective in an area that so often focuses solely on the future, he has little to offer historians interested in technology. He draws on an odd and often outdated assortment of sources (e.g., a 1960 history of technology, BBC television programs) while ignoring some major 628 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE secondary works (e.g., Michael R. Williams’s A History of Computing Technology and Shoshana Zuboff’s In the Age ofthe Smart Machine). The events or technologies he emphasizes sometimes seem randomly chosen. More troubling, however, is his naive, deterministic, and optimistic understanding of relationships between technology and its political, economic, and cultural setting. For example, he attributes the information revolution “to a single cause: the spectacular techno­ logical advances produced following the post-war development of the computer” (p. 34) and states that “ever since the discovery by Samuel Morse that the alphabet could be represented by a series of dots and dashes, digital transmission was destined to culminate in an integrated digital network—the ISDN” (p. 293). Near the end of the book he provides an uncritical paean to technology: “Traditional human skills of communication and craftsmanship have always benefitted from the technological advances achieved throughout history” (p. 299). Those interested in understanding recent developments in com­ puters and telecommunications may find the book somewhat more useful than historians will. Occasionally, Saxby provides interesting insights into legal issues and standards battles. Moreover, on some topics he provides much information about the contemporary British markets (though his shifts of focus between British and world markets often seem random). But readers should beware of taking his accounts even of contemporary events uncritically. For example, the book gives the impression that the original IBM personal computer did not have much effect on the market. It also ignores the recent polarization of the personal computer market between IBM (and compatibles) with DOS and Apple’s Macintosh with its graphical interface. Finally, the book’s abysmal...

Quantum computation

As computers become faster they must become smaller because of the finiteness of the speed of light. The history of computer technology has involved a sequence of changes from one type of physical realisation to another – from gears to relays to valves to transistors to integrated circuits and so on. The step to the molecular scale – the quantum level – will be next. Quantum theory is already important in the design of microelectronic components. But soon it will be necessary to harness quantum theory, rather than simply take it into account, to give components their functionality.

The Electronic Blackboard: Potential for the Developing World's Education

After briefly reviewing the history of computer technology used for instruction, the author introduces the concept of collectivized computer assisted instruction. Here the focus is on the use of the microcomputer as a tool for group instruction as opposed to the individualized instruction developed in early C.A.I. efforts.Several possible scenarios of execution are examined and the potential use of microcomputer technology together with satellite communications is explored. The author then questions traditional instructional strategies which treat students as “single channel processors” while with instructional technology they could be instructed as “multi-channel processors” which indeed humans really are.