The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of the global village. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
The medium is the message. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information. Tim Berners-Lee
Today, if you have an Internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world’s greatest libraries – indeed, in most respects what is available through the Internet dwarfs those libraries, and it is incomparably easier to find what you need. Peter Singer
On January 24th Apple Computers will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984. Apple Computers’ television advertisement
To err is human but to really foul things up requires a computer. Farmers’ Almanac, 1978
Computers are composed of nothing more than logic gates stretched out to the horizon in a vast numerical irrigation system. Stan Augarten, State of the Art: A Photographic History of the Integrated Circuit, 1983
The PC is the LSD of the ‘90s. Timothy Leary, cited Guardian 1st June 1996
Moore’s Law states that computer power doubles every eighteen months. Professor Michio Kaku
We could be facing economic stagnation because computers are simply not capable of evolving to the next step if they are based on silicon. Michio Kaku
IBM And The Holocaust: is the stunning story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany – beginning in 1933 ... IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloguing programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s. Online article, cited Alex Jones, ‘Martial Law 9/11 The Rise of the Police State’
IBM helped Hitler organise holocaust, says book [IBM and the Holocaust]. Online article 12th February 2001, cited Alex Jones, ‘Martial Law 9/11 The Rise of the Police State’
Computers are anti-Faraday machines. He said he couldn’t understand anything until he could count it, while computers count everything and understand nothing. Ralph Cornes, Guardian 28th March 1991
Web-Bot is a software application that automatically combs internet data in search of key words denoting trends. It not only finds the key words, but those surrounding them, and analyses the results using linguistic tools. Nostradamus Effect: Extinction 2012, History 2008
That age began with a vicious power struggle to decide who would control the future of the just emerging web. A struggle that would end with a epic courtroom battle. Download: The True Story of the Internet, Science 2012
Invented in 1989 by an English scientist Tim Berners-Lee. ibid.
In the Fall of 1993 the Illinois geeks posted Mosaic online and made a freely downloadable gift to humanity. And what a gift it turned out to be. ibid.
Gates of course was the co-founder and CEO of Microsoft, the most important and fantastically profitable hi-tech company of them all. Over the course of two decades Microsoft had established a near monopoly over PC operating systems. ibid.
On 13th October 1994 after months of feverish non-stop coding Netscape’s new web browser Navigator finally hit the streets. ibid.
By the middle of the 1990s Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law were working hand in hand fuelling an upward spiral: faster, cheaper more powerful PCs were increasingly connected together. ibid.
With a near-monopoly over Windows operating system, Microsoft controlled the ultimate platform. ibid.
The problem for Netscape was that Bill Gates and his company now viewed Netscape as its primary threat to their continued dominance. ibid.
But Microsoft had billions of dollars in the bank which let it do something extraordinary: rather than charging money for its web browser as Netscape had to, Microsoft was able to give Internet Explorer away for free, bundled and seamlessly integrated into Windows operating system. ibid.
It was all downhill for Netscape. A year later, its market share now in single figures and dwindling, the company that ushered in the internet age was acquired by a bigger but much un-cooler company AOL. ibid.
Its 1998 and the United States Department of Justice ... launched an anti-trust lawsuit against Bill Gates’ company. ibid.
While Jerry [Yang] and David [Filo] were goofing around they hit on an idea that would become the basis for one of America’s best known businesses. And turn them into billionaires. Today their company is called Yahoo. ibid.
Advertising split the early web community. ibid.
For the first time Yahoo had shown it was possible to make money on the Web. It was a crucial moment in the story. And it meant one thing: the Web boom had begun. ibid.
It was nice guy Larry [Page] that had the genius and insight that turned Search into something magical, and launched Google. ibid.
To find the most relevant sites what you had to do was count the Links. ibid.
Googlemania has gradually started to give way to creeping Googlephobia. ibid.
Google has come further and faster than any company ever before. ibid.
The age of e-commerce ... The early success of Amazon and ebay didn’t go unnoticed on Wall Street. ibid.
ebay stocks soared that first day. At the end of it the company was now valued at more than two billion dollars. ibid.
MP3 provided a way of compressing the data to a much smaller digital package. ibid.
The furore over the Napster/Metallica War boosted Napster’s popularity even more. Its user base was exploding. ibid.
You are going to see something absolutely amazing: a machine reading to a blind man. A computer will read an ordinary book ... A man’s voice being understood by machine ... At the heart of both these machines are tiny powerful computers built around the new technology of silicon chips. Horizon: The Chips Are Down, BBC 1978
It’s called a microprocessor. Such chips will totally revolutionise our way of life. ibid.
The single transistor was made in 1957; in 1963 it was eight on a chip; today the figure is a quarter of a million. ibid.
Money for Space and Defence really made the industry boom. ibid.
The process has so many steps it can be impossible to find out what’s wrong. ibid.
After the wafers have been tested they are shipped to the far east by air. In fact all the manufacturers send their chips to be mounted where labour is cheap. ibid.
At this point the individual good ones are worth fifty pence each. ibid.
Pocket calculators ... Watches ... Now there is a new war ... Making games around chips that control TV screens is an industry worth a quarter of a billion pounds a year, and it’s growing. ibid.
There’s a new machine coming into use – it’s called a word processor. ibid.
The EMI body scanner – an X-ray camera rotates around the patient’s body. ibid.
The [Hubble] telescope’s computer has very little memory. Horizon: The Sharpest Show of the Universe, BBC 1990
Alan Mathison Turing, mathematician, code-breaker and inventor of the computer was born in London in 1912. Horizon: The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing, BBC 1992
Turing’s paper described how any logical process could be broken down into its simplest possible components – precise sequential steps that could in principle be carried out by a machine. With his new definition of method as machine he was able to formulate a logical paradox which rapidly disposed of Gilbert’s question. ibid.
He went on to imagine a universal machine which could read and execute the instructions set of any single Turing machine and therefore perform all logical tasks ... He had in effect formulated the idea of the stored programmed computer. ibid.
To stop the U-boats Enigma had to be broken. Enigma was the most advanced deciphering device of its time. ibid.
Bletchley Park was the headquarters of the British code-breaking effort ... Alan Turing was one of the first to arrive ... In 1944 he designed a speech enciphering machine codenamed Delilah. ibid.
His vision was of a computer and programming that could simulate mental processes. ibid.
Back in 1950 Turing was using the Manchester computer to explore a new interest he had discovered in biology and cell differentiation. ibid.