This page contains materials intended
to facilitate class discussion (excerpts from readings,
outlines of issues, links to resources, etc.). The
materials are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page is subject
to revision as the instructor finalizes preparation.
(Last revised
1/18/02
)
Peak Epoch
(Period of Monopolistic or
Cartel Dominance)
Information as Mass Media
Radio, Photography,
Film, TV, Magazines
Broadcast
Model
1920s-1970s
Information
as Communication
Telecom,
Radio, Cryptography
Transmission
Model
1940s-70s
(ATT breakup in 1984)
Information
as Mainframe Computing
Mainframes
and Minicomputers, Databases
Centralized
information services
1950s-1970s
Information
as Personal Computing/ Networking
PC's, Networks
(LAN's, WAN's), Graphical User Interface (GUI),
the Software Revolution, Hypertext
Client/Server
Architecture
1980s-2000s
We've been introduced to the interrelated revolutions
in media and communications in the
middle of the 20th century (both of which occurred
not just at the level of technologies but of new,
general theories of media and communications).
Today we come to the computing revolution that
began in the same time frame and that added itself
to the new concepts of media and communications
to create our contemporary understanding of "information."
Indeed, the scene of the new media and new communications
of the 20th century helped prepare the ground
for the arrival of computers:
They were part of the reason computers were
needed: as an aid to managing the ever more
intricate, self-systemic, "unnatural"
forms of information. For example, consider
this prophecy of computing embedded in Weaver
(p. 109):
"The theory provides for very sophisticated
transmitters and receivers—such, for
example, as possess 'memories,' so that the
way they encode a certain symbol of the message
depends not only upon this one symbol, but
also upon previous symbols of the message
and the way they have been encoded."
Agenda for today's class and the next class:
a history of computing in two installments:
(1) Computing through the Age of the Mainframe:
Pre-20th-Century Analog Computing
Electronic Digital Computing (WW II-1970s)
(2) Personal Computing and Networking (1980s-2000s)
Purpose of the history:
To expand our foreshortened memory to include
the early history of the computer (which was
elite, secretive, and thus less well-known)
To provide a sense of the alternative paradigms—logical,
philosophical, social, and cultural—that
the computer revolution experimented with.
Pre-20th-Century Analog Computing
Triggering problem (i.e., the immediate problem
to be solved): the generation of mathematical
tables and other tabular
forms of knowledge
Charles Babbage's Difference
Engine & Analytical
Engine (1820s-30s) [for a speculative-fiction
treatment of Babbage's invention, see William
Gibson and Bruce Sterling's novel, The Difference
Engine, 1991]
Analog Principle: the use of a physical
apparatus to model a mathematical formula
along a continuous scale of variation.
Cf., the slide
rule (invented 1622).
Limitations of analog principle:
Not every mathematical problem can
be matched by a physical machine
Physical limitations to accuracy
Speed
Non-programmability, limited programmability,
or external storage of programs
Implementation:
[none]
Social and Cultural
Paradigm: [none]
Electronic Digital Computing
(WW II - 1970s)
Triggering problems: ballistics and cryptography
during WW II, then business sorting and tabulating
problems from the 1950s on
The state-of-the-art electromechanical analog
calculating device in the first half of the
20th century: the Hollerith/IBM Punch Card Systems
1
The Moore School of Electrical Engineering
(U. Penn.), John Eckert and John Mauchly, and
the electronic digital ENIAC (1943-44) 1
| 2
| Vacuum
Tube
Intervention of John
von Neumann (meeting at railroad station
between von Neumann and Herman Goldstine)
Principle of the "stored program"
and EDVAC
(1944-45); von Neumann's A First Draft of
a Report on the EDVAC (June 1945)
Eckert-Mauchly Corporation (later Sperry-Rand)
and the impact of computing on business and
the media: the UNIVAC (1951) 1
| 2
| 3.
UNIVAC's prediction of the Eisenhower landslide
in 1952 for CBS
Thomas Watson, Jr.'s epiphany at IBM in 1952:
"My God, here we are trying to build Defense
Calculators, while UNIVAC is smart enough to
start taking all the civilian business away!"
IBM
System/360 (c. 1969) (multi-level series
of computers with shared programming)
Paradigm of Mainframe Computing (the
1st generation of electronic digital computing):
Conceptual (Logical
and Engineering) Paradigm:
Digital Principle:
The generality of digital mathematics/logic:
Herman Goldstine, The Computer
from Pascal to von Neumann,
p. 143: "[The digital approach]
is the realization that a machine
can be built to imitate the
human method of calculating:
to count and to build up the
elementary operations—addition,
subtraction, multiplication,
division—by counting. Not
only can this be done but it
may be shown that, in general,
mathematical formulations may
be handled by means of these
elementary operations. . . .
suffice it to say that for our
purposes numerical mathematics
can be built up out of the elementary
processes of counting, and therefore
that this approach has a very
real sense of universality or
general purposeness about it."
George Boole (1815-1864) and Boolean
fusion of algebra and logic:
"Let us conceive, then,
of an Algebra in which the symbols
x, y, z, &c. admit
indifferently of the values
0 and 1, and of these values
alone. The laws, the axioms,
and the processes, of such an
Algebra will be identical in
their whole extent with the
laws, the axioms, and the processes
of an Algebra of Logic."
The new technological bias toward
digital operations: relays, transistors,
Claude Shannon's master's thesis on
the relation between switching circuits
and Boolean algebra.
The von Neumann computer logical architecture:
Sequential, linear calculation (counting
and accumulating operations)
Programmability based on "stored
programs" in memory (fast access
to both instructions and data; equivalence
of programming instructions and data
[both are "writable"])
Separation of processing from memory
Implementation:
Hardware: central computer, dumb
terminals
Software: "vertical"
applications
Theater of Operation: the "vertically-integrated"
company; MIS Departments (Management
Information Services); data-entry clerical
pools
Mark Poster, The Second Media
Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1995),
p. 86: "The population is now cognizant
of being surveilled constantly by databases
and it apparently feels ill at ease as
a result. Database anxiety has not of
yet developed into an issue of national
political prominence but it is clearly
a growing concern of many and bespeaks
a new level of what Foucault calls the
normalization of the population" (Poster
is discussing the database as "super-panopticon")
Michel Foucault, Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage,
1979)
Jeremy Bentham, The Works of
Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: William
Tait, 1843) (on the Panopticon)
References
History of Computing Resources:
Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer
from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1993)
Other Resources:
Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage,
1979)
Jeremy Bentham, The Works of
Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: William
Tait, 1843) (on the Panopticon)
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling,
The Difference Engine (New York:
Bantam, 1991)
Mark Poster, The Second Media
Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1995)
Information as Mass Media
