digital history
Famous and prescient papers from the past - dreams of the coming digital universe. Perhaps you think it was the creation of the 21st century? Think again ...
- Tablet newspaper as seen in 1994
- A hundred years after the predictions below, designers, journalists and researchers imagined Tablets, "a whole new class of computer. They'll weigh under two pounds. They'll be totally portable. They'll have a clarity of screen display comparable to ink on paper. They'll be able to blend text, video, audio, and graphics together."
- The End of
Books, by Octave Uzanne
- From way back in 1894: the end of printing, the arrival of the
ipod and even television, Octave Uzanne's "The End of Books",
which, in 1894 predicted that printing would be made obsolescent by
New Technology.
As we may think- Vannevar Bush's 1945 article presaging hyperlinks. Phew! I thought
for a minute it had become accessible only to subscribers to Atlantic
Monthly, which first published it, but information wants to be free
... as also in the case of
- The
computers of tomorrow
- Martin Greenberger, writing in 1964, imagining the effects of universal
computing
- Doug Engelbart giving the "mother of all Demos" 1968
- The wonders of the mouse (more a rat then), cut-and-paste, automatic list numering, text files, hypertext - all new. Even the Arpanet - soon we'll be able to link 20 computers together ... to provide networked information. In the collections of Stanford University. ...
Google videos version
- From the very birth of the World Wide Web:
- "A simple protocol (" HTTP ") is used to allow a browser
program to request a keyword search by a remote information server."
Look at the page author at the bottom of the page: TimBL. (thanks to
Jon Pratty for this)
- The Domesday
Project
- A lot later we began to worry about technological obsolescence. The BBC's splendid
Domesday Project had schoolchildren all over england compiling records
of their parishes. Fifteen years later the discs are icons of the digital
preservation movement. This is a lovely article by one of the original
project leaders.
- Scientific, industrial
and cultural heritage: a shared approach
- Extremely interesting and enlightening article on the nature of the information that we were creating back then, by Lorcan Dempsey,
especially the first half, on information from 'memory organisations'
- Howard Besser's homepage
- Howard Besser is Professor at New York University. His homepage is
a wonderful source of links to stuff about digital technology, information,
and its effects on us.
- Augmented
books, knowledge and culture
- By Kim Veltman, one of the people more concerned with the effects
on and potential of new technologies to affect knowledge and culture
than with the technology and processes. From the Internet Society, Japan
2000.
- UNESCO
portal to the Knowledge Society
- Member States have mandated the Organization to keep them abreast
with these new ethical, legal and societal challenges by establishing
a permanent international monitoring mechanism.
