I’m a researcher, writer, and designer who has spent most of the past twenty-five years working in the technology industry, following an earlier career as a journalist and academic librarian. I've developed an abiding interest in the history of knowledge networks. I've written two books on the history of the information age, as well as a number of newspaper and magazine articles on new and emerging technologies. While the technology industry often seems to have little use for its own history, I have found the history of networked systems to be a rich source of inspiration, full of sources of inspiration that can help us start to envision a wide range of possible futures.
I wrote...
Informatica: Mastering Information through the Ages
Today's "information explosion" may seem like an acutely modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation—or even the first species—to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of computers, human beings were collecting, storing, and organizing information: from Ice Age taxonomies to Sumerian archives, Greek libraries to Christian monasteries.
We stand at a precipice, struggling to cope with a growing tsunami of data. Informatica tries to put these developments into historical context, in hopes of helping us find new perspectives on tackling the age-old problem of information overload. We can understand this predicament not just as the result of technological change, but as the latest chapter in an ancient story that we are only beginning to understand.
Wells’s incredibly prescient 1937 collection of essays on the future of information predicts the emergence of a global knowledge network – a “world brain” – that promises to transform the human experience.
Though better known today as a science fiction writer (War of the Worlds, The Time Machine), Wells was also a prolific essayist, political activist, and social polemicist. He believed that humanity could take a great leap forward by creating a new kind of connected information network, “a permanent central Encyclopaedic organisation” that would be freely available to everyone on earth.
Such a system would enable citizens to become more informed, ensuring that societal disparities in education levels and access to information would slowly disappear - paving the way for a more egalitarian, enlightened society.
World Brain is an article written by H. G. Wells and first contributed to the new "Encyclopédie Française" in 1937. It explores the idea of a "permanent world encyclopaedia" that would contain "the whole human memory" and that would be "a world synthesis of bibliography and documentation with the indexed archives of the world." Fascinating and arguably prophetic reading, "World Brain" will appeal to fan Wells' work. Herbert George Wells (1866 - 1946) was a prolific English writer who wrote in a variety of genres, including the novel, politics, history, and social commentary. Today, he is perhaps best remembered for…
Longtime technology journalist John Markoff explores the origins of the Silicon Valley mythos in this engaging and insightful history of the early personal computer industry.
The book explores how the modern personal computer took shape amid the counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and 1970s, where an eccentric cast of technology visionaries, hackers, and misfits began pushing the boundaries of human consciousness: embracing utopian ideals, experimenting with mind-expanding drugs, and exploring the still-uncharted possibilities of personal computing.
Markoff does a masterful job of connecting the dots between the Sixties counterculture and the revolutionary ethos that undergirded the early personal computing industry, making a convincing case that our present-day technology culture is deeply rooted in this transformative period in American culture. An entertaining and inspiring read.
"This makes entertaining reading. Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers." -New York Times
Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff's landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs-the culture being counter- and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It's a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and '70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these…
Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer James Gleick surveys the history of the information age in this sweeping, wildly ambitious narrative that spans a range of topics from African talking drums to the invention of the telegraph, early computing, and the emergence of the Internet and contemporary networked culture.
The book shines in its coverage of computer science pioneers like nineteenth-century mathematician Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon (who paved the way for modern information theory), Alan Turing (inventor of the first modern computer), and cybernetics theorist Norbert Wiener.
Gleick does an astonishingly good job of dissecting dense theoretical material and making it accessible and entertaining. Written in an unconventional, non-linear style, the book looks deeply into the history of an idea—information—that is continually transforming the world around us.
Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2012, the world's leading prize for popular science writing.
We live in the information age. But every era of history has had its own information revolution: the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of the charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, the cracking of the genetic code.
In 'The Information' James Gleick tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know. From African talking drums to Wikipedia, from Morse code to the 'bit', it is a fascinating…
Engelbart’s seminal 1962 book on the possibilities of networked computers builds directly on Bush’s ideas, laying out a groundbreaking new vision for how computers might work.
In collaboration with a team of brilliant collaborators at the Stanford Research Institute, Englelbart began to outline a revolutionary vision for a new kind of collaboration between people and computers. He argued for a new class of technology that would enable computers to augment—rather than supplant—human intelligence. Engelbart’s work led directly to the invention of the graphical user interface, hyperlinking, and pointing devices like the mouse (another Engelbart invention).
Though little read today, Augmenting Human Intellect has exerted a lasting impact on contemporary computing, and many computer scientists now acknowledge it as one of the intellectual foundations of the modern Internet.
A new paperback edition of the book the Wall Street Journal dubbed “a Dot-Com cult classic,” by the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses-the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first “Internet.”
The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts…
The famously mercurial Nelson has been writing about the possibilities of networked information since the 1960s.
Indeed, he first coined the term “hypertext” in 1965. In Literary Machines (first published in 1981), he proposed a hypertext system dubbed Xanadu (after Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous “vision in a dream”), a new kind of networked system that would serve as a repository of all the world’s knowledge.
He proposed that users could connect related documents together via “jump links,” embed content from one document into another via what he called “transclusion,” and even explored the possibilities of micropayments.
Nelson’s pioneering work won him legions of acolytes in the early days of the personal computing and hypertext movements, directly influencing the development of later networked systems including the World Wide Web.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Each of the sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also a view of ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even bullfighting in Spain is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago - a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull. Each of the eleven sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through…
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