But it’s hard to kill an idea like that. In the world of the 1940s, outside Bletchley Park, some of the necessary ideas were already coming together.
A project between IBM and Harvard University, masterminded by Howard Aiken, developed the Harvard Mark 1, a giant programmable calculator with many computer-like features, which first ran in 1943. The destruction of Bletchley Park left behind, in addition to the handful of eccentrics who believed in the possibility of building a computer, another handful who had actually seen one in operation. Within a year or two immediately following the war, academics in the UK (at Manchester and Cambridge) and in the US (in Pennsylvania and elsewhere) started building computers. Within a very few years, the computer age had taken off.
But that’s another story.
Epilogue
We have seen a skein of different ideas, developing over the course of hu-man history, interacting with and feeding offone another, brokered by peo-ple with a wide variety of different motivations. We have seen the notion of dataemerge gradually and gradually absorb many other concepts. Informa-tion, which might be seen as an abstraction likematterorenergy, is in some sense “carried” by data, or perhaps may be extracted from it. Numbers are data, text is data, pictures are data, music is data. But that’s just the begin-ning—now everything we do, every interaction we have with any part of the world around us, is data.
Of course this is all absurd. Music (just to take one example) is a human experience, or rather a whole raft of human experiences, and to regard it as data is to ignore or put aside both the nature and the validity of the experi-ence, whether of composing or of performing or of listening. Nevertheless, it is convenient to pretend that music is data, because there is so much we can do with it on the back of that pretence. Not only can we record, store, re-trieve, transmit, broadcast music-as-data, we can also make use of any num-ber of digital tools (as well as the slightly older analogue electronic ones) as part of the process of creation, in both composition and performance.
In the twenty-first century, data, data processing and manipulation, and all the raft of technologies around data, are central to how we see the world. In these days of data protection and privacy, of laws and regulations around this domain, of data mining, of data theft, of people and organi-sations who relentlessly collect data about us and who manipulate us by manipulating our data, and so on—in these days, it is hard to re-imagine the world as it was before the notion of data took hold. The digital com-puter—together with all the other information and communication tech-nologies—is of course at the core of this data-centred world. Which is why it is tempting to speak of the invention of the computer having ushered in a
©Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0225.13
144 B C, Before Computers
revolution.
So, was it a revolution? Did the arrival of computers result in an over-throw of the existing order of things and its replacement by something fun-damentally new?
Certainly, the effect on our lives of the developments in the domain of the information and communication technologies, subsequent to and at least to some extent consequent upon the invention of computers in the 1940s, has been immense, arguably revolutionary. The world of email, the internet, online shopping, online management of bank accounts, mobile phones dou-bling as cameras, digital radio and television, downloaded recorded sound and films, satellite navigation, ebooks, Google, Wikipedia, social media—all this would have seemed utterly extraordinary, something in the realm of fantasy, to my parents at the time I was born.
Nevertheless, the existing order is seldom so easily cast aside. What this book has demonstrated, I hope, is the extraordinary amount of stuff—of knowledge, understanding, invention, ways of thinking and doing, ideas, methods and techniques—we have brought with us over this journey. In many significant ways, the IT world not only draws on the past, but is rooted in it. This past is not just (though it very much includes) the couple of cen-turies following the industrial revolution, but goes way back—to the Renais-sance, to the invention of printing, to the ninth-century Arabic and seventh-century Hindu mathematicians, to the Roman empire, to the Greeks and the Phoenicians, to the invention of writing itself.
Bibliography
What follows is a short list of books and essays (and one film) that have in-spired me and that I have mentioned in this book for one reason or another.
But I must give one reference pride of place as my go-to source of first and often only resort:
Wikipedia: Many articles, by many authors.
—
Jim Al-Khalili,Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science(Penguin, 2012).
Isaac Asimov,Foundaton Trilogy(Gnome Press, 1951).
Antonio Badia,The Information Manifold: Why Computers Can’t Solve Algorithmic Bias and Fake News(MIT Press, 2019).
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12061.001.0001 The Venerable Bede,On the Reckoning of Time(c. 723).
Ray Bradbury,Fahrenheit 451(Ballantine, 1953).
Vera Britain,Testament of Youth(Victor Gollancz, 1933).
Lewis Carroll,Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There(1871).
James Essinger,Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age(Oxford University Press, 2004).
Luciano Floridi,Information: A Very Short Introduction(Oxford University Press, 2010).
https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199551378.001.0001 James Gleick,The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood(Fourth Estate,
2011).
Stephen Jay Gould, ‘The Panda’s Thumb of Technology’, inBully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History(Penguin, 1992).
GPO Film Unit,Night Mail(1936).
Robert Kaplan,The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero(Allen Lane, 1999).
John Man,Alphabeta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World(Headline, 2000).
John Man,The Gutenberg Revolution: The story of a genius and an invention that changed the world(Review, 2002).
Cyril Northcote Parkinson,Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress (Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
Steven Pinker,The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind (Harper, 1994).
Andrew Robinson,The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms(Thames & Hudson, 1995; 2nd ed 2007).
David Rothenberg,Hand’s End: Technology and the Limits of Nature (University of California Press, 1995).
Paul Saenger,Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading(Stanford University Press, 2000).
Claude Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’The Bell System Technical JournalXXVII, No. 3 (July 1948), pp. 379–423.
Adam Silverstein,Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Simon Singh,The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography(Fourth Estate, 1999).
Tom Standage,The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers(Walker, 1998).
JoAnne Yates, ‘Co-evolution of Information-Processing Technology and Use: Interaction between the Life Insurance and Tabulating Industries’
The Business History Review67, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 1–51.
14 B C, Before Computers