Period, yes, but
fun too

Historical atlas
Prehistory
Mesopotamia
Egypt
Greece
Rome
Middle Ages
Renaissance
Industrial age
Victorian times
Depression
WWII
Cold war
Information age
Future
King's mistress

Home

Stumble It!

Information age:

Computers

There are (still) millions of people like me, who did their Ph D with a combination of mental arithmetic, a good slide rule and some graph paper. Before 1980, most students had no access to personal computers of even handheld calculators. The work was not more difficult, but it took much longer! A US professor who was my mentor told me that when he did his thesis, he used the big university computer to print his work, and the members of his thesis committee felt that it was close to cheating, because it gave him an advantage over other students who did not think of it. Twenty and some years later, in Europe, I got the same comment because I had used a word processor. Very funny, Charlie Brown! So the world changed recently- only one genration ago-, and this change had been pegged the "information age" because it affects not only students, but all of us.

Who are the heroes of this new epoch? There are hundreds of them, but the ones we cannot ignore are:

Jack St. Clair Kilby (b. 1923) There is no computer or cell phone or hand-held calculator without micro-chips. Kilby worked a long time for Texas Instruments and has about 90 patented inventions. He was instrumental in creating the first hand-held calculator. Robert Noyce (b. 1927) got the same idea so they share the invention of integrated circuitry. Noyce was the founder of Intel. An inforned book to read is:The Chip by T.R. Reid (essential book). How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution. The two heroes never contested each other as a co-inventors, so we should do the same, whatever arguments you find in the book.

Steve Jobs (b. 1955) and Steve Wozniak (b. 1950) The story of two young men who create a fully assembled small computer in their garage is very romantic. They did it in 1975, and were multi-millionaires in less than five years. Steve Wozniak went on into a variety of projects. Steve Jobs was later fired from his own company (Apple) and came back with a vengeance as CEO to load a number of successful products, such as the iMac and the iPod. Both men are fascinating.
Wozniak wrote an autobiography: iWoz.
Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen Linzmayer is the book who gives you the basics on the beginning of the great computer revolution and introduces you to the major players, including Bill Gates.

iCon: Steve Jobs by Jeffrey S. Young & William L. Simon is not a very good book, it is not well researched or even well written, and this is too bad, because it covers the interesting "return" of Jobs to Apple.

Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955) also built his own home computer from scratch in 1975, but he did not sell it: Tim had in mind to become a scientist. He became a physicist and worked in research at the CERN in Switzerland. He thought of supplying the internet (the networks linking computers) with an easy communication system allowing fast transfer of information. It is the World Wide Web (b. 1992) which allows computer users to communicate. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) establishes the standards of communications. Tim's invention is not patented (everybody has access to it and he does not make money out of it). If you are fascinated by computers, you must read one of Berners-Lee books, for instance Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. It is not always easy to read, but it is worth every effort.

Mobile phones
Mobile phones, combining a radio and a telephone, are much older than me: you see them in any old movie about the military. But the modern cell phone everybody has come to buy dates from the 1980ies. I used to think that these phones were for firefighters and doctors for urgent matters; now I see them on everybody's ear, from people who just want to say where they are ("The bus is coming now") to people who consult by phone in the grocery store ("Iceberg salad or spinach?") It is a brave new world.

Satellites-GPS
Since the first Sputnik in 1957, thousands of satellites have been launched. Their use is very diverse: communication, navigation (they have changed, for instance, the way ships calculate where they are), military uses. The most important use for us is probably weather prediction using satellite information. It already has saved many lives. Satellite observations are not confined to temperature, clouds cover or ice movements: a huge number of parameters are now measured by satellites; they can allow, for instance, to predict the desertification of a region, or to measure how much crop will grow in any region or to measure surface currents of the ocean which influence the climate. And then of course, there are all the satellites that look out at the other planets, the sun, the stars.
GPS is now precise to a level undreamt of thirty years ago : you should hear how the GPS insults my son-in-law if he takes a wrong turn!

All this technology came with its own series of problems: how to protect it against attacks, how to deal with all the space garbage we create and some philosophical problems to deal with such as the disparity of access to information between countries and how to protect our freedom (what is left of it).

Great books and movies

Like any invention, computers and the internet and GPS brought with them their own new crimes, the most pernicious being probably child pornography. Then there are the bad hackers, who want to cause you pain and feel it makes them great. At a time when it was still difficult or expensive to copy one's data, I have known quite a few students who lost their work. Banks do not tell you when they are hacked or how much money they lost: they are afraid people would panic. My own bank in Savannah once discovered that a card reader had been inserted in one of their ATM machines. Did they warn their customers of the risk of going late at an ATM which was not properly protected? They did not, I only heard about it because I overheard a conversation at the police station.
So there is material for great stories and even greater movies, and though a new literary genre was created (cyberpunk. see below) I have not found there much satisfaction, so let me start with the best of the best: The cuckoo's egg, by Cliff Stoll(essential book). This is the true story of a young astronomer from Berkeley making some money as a computer assistant manager. Cliff is in charge of finding the origin of a 75 cents discrepancy between the two systems allotting computer time and billing at Berkeley. This 75 cents error is the astonishing start of the discovery of an international spy network. The book is well written with a good mix of humor and ingenuity that makes the author likeable. Berkeley has a sub-culture which is not fond of law and order, so Cliff is criticized by his friends for his persistent contacts with police and the FBI. It makes an interesting background to a lovable book.

A fiction writer who also knows what he is talking about is Vernon Vinge. In A Fire Upon the Deep, different zones of technological level can be achieved depending where your world is in the galaxy. In Rainbows' end, a man recovering from Alzheimer has to learn new technology. It is just the start of a complex plot. The book deals with augmented reality and virtual worlds and all kinds of exciting concepts.

The cyberpunk literature (one branch of sci-fi) made a blast with The neuromancer by William Gibson in 1984. It is not my kind of a book because I dislike doom literature, but that should not prevent you to check it out. See for instance the comments of Professor Paul Brians here.

More talented, I think, was George Alec Effinger who mixed great titles, humor, dark thoughts and dark visions in a very unique way. When Gravity Fails is set in a time where the Arab world dominates a decadent western civilization. All kinds of gadgets appear in the book that can modify one's brain.

Much more light and less ambitious, if you like just fun, are the mysteries of Turing Hopper. Turing is an "Artificial Intelligence Personality" who solves murder cases. The first book of the series by Donna Andrews is You've Got Murder.

Star wars is still an astonishing series, the first relying heavily on computer games.
On the dangers of all this technology to freedom, I thought that The net (1995, with Sandra Bullock) presented a good case. I did not think it was too far-fetched: first: all the stolen info in the movie comes from a popular program, and then, you would not believe how much information can be gathered about you in the best circumstances.

Try the best of real bookstores if you dislike virtual ones: