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07.08
The 60th Birthday of
the Information Age
By Michael N.
Geselowitz, Ph.D., IEEE History Center
“Technological Revolutions,”
analogized by historians to political
revolutions, have unfolded more slowly than
their social counterparts. It took hundreds if
not thousands of years from the earliest
domestication of plants and animals to the point
where agriculture was the main human lifeway.
Nevertheless, there are clearly times in history
when the methods people use to interact with
their environment changed more quickly and more
broadly than at other times.
For example, many important
social, political and technological developments
occurred in 17th and early 18th century Europe.
It is extremely difficult to pin down start and
end dates for these developments. Historians
often point to the year 1712, when Thomas
Newcomen invented a practical (if inefficient)
steam engine. This innovation opened the
floodgates to the mechanization of society,
which by the 1840s — a mere century and a
quarter later — was firmly entrenched. This
period is known as the Industrial Revolution,
and Western society was completely transformed
culturally, socially, politically and
economically, as well as technologically. Some
historians describe a second phase of the
Industrial Revolution in the late 19th and early
20th century as a result of advances in
materials engineering, and of the introduction
of electrical-based technologies. Again, the
impact on the rest of society was both broad and
deep.
Based on these historical
precedents and the technological developments of
today, many “futurists” argue that a third, even
more radical transformation of technology and
society is underway. The belief is that this
“Third Industrial Revolution” will be (or is,
since we may be in the middle of it) the result
of the convergence of various technologies and
sciences that were previously operating in
separate channels — electronics, computing,
communication, biology, quantum physics — and
that these will most notably lead to the rise of
artificial intelligence and the dawning of a
true post-industrial “Information Age.” In a
1993 essay, Vernor Vinge, who had been
discussing technological change for about a
decade, called this transformation a
“singularity” and predicted that it would arrive
between 2005 and 2030. The June 2008 issue of
IEEE Spectrum is devoted to analyzing
how far along we are in the “Information
Revolution,” and includes an update from Vinge
on how we are doing.
Since this is a history column,
I will not enter into the debate on the future.
Instead, I will point out that we may want to
take out a moment to celebrate a key anniversary
this year. For, if indeed the current
convergence of multiple technologies does lead
to a transformative “singularity,” then I am
willing to wager that future historians will
look back to 1948 — an even 60 years ago — as
the year it “began.” IEEE History Center Senior
Research Historian Frederik Nebeker has called
1948 an “Annus Mirabilis” for technology.
Although a great deal of important technical and
scientific work took place during and as a
result of World War II, the potential for
advance all seem to break out in a single year.
To begin, in June 1948, the
first operational stored-program electronic
computer was completed at the University of
Manchester in the United Kingdom. Although only
a prototype, in was the advance guard for a
number of full-scale stored-program computers
under construction at a number of locations.
Still in June, Bell Labs, in New Jersey,
announced the invention of the transistor, a
solid-date amplifying device. This development
held out the promise that electronic devices
such as the computer could one day be
manufactured with small size, reliability and
low energy requirements.
Then, in the July 1948 issue of
The Bell System Technical Journal —
exactly 60 years ago this month — Claude Shannon
published his seminal paper, “A Mathematical
Theory of Communication,” where he demonstrated
that communication was a quantifiable phenomenon
that therefore could be instrumentalized and
enhanced through the newly emerging
computational sciences and technologies. The
convergence had begun.
If these developments were not
enough, 1948 also saw the publication of Norbert
Wiener’s classic book Cybernetics, which
brought to a wider audience understanding of the
coming impact of computers, and also explicitly
compared biological systems with electrical
communications and control systems — a key
element of the presumed coming convergence. A
second paper by Shannon (with Bernard Oliver and
John Pierce) introduced pulse-code modulation as
a new means of transmitting information. And a
paper by Maurice Bartlett described the
time-averaging method of measuring the average
power spectral density.
So, if your busy 24/7 schedule
brought on by the recent technological
developments allows you a few moments of
leisure, why not lift a glass and have a piece
of cake for the “Information Age” as it turns 60
along with many of the “Baby Boomers” who grew
up with it.
Michael N. Geselowitz, Ph.D., is
staff director at the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University in New Brunswick,
N.J. Visit the IEEE History Center's Web page
at:
www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center.
He can be reached at
todaysengineer@ieee.org.
Opinions expressed are the
author's.
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