Vannevar Bush
- Organized of the Manhattan Project (Fat Man & Little Boy)
- Completed groundbreaking analog computing projects
- 1940- gained funds & political support form Franklin D Roosevelt
- Proposed the concept of "MEMEX" -- afuture device for individual use, an automated private file and library, a personal storage devide
- "Iron Triangle"
- Circa 1945
- Invented the mouse, the word processor, and the hyperlink
- Discovered the hyperlink
- Coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"
- July 1945
- Pertains to the recording and organization of information, greater information access, "MEMEX".
- Influenced technologies today ie. hypertext, personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web,online encyclopedias
- Foreshadowed much of the future, especially the internet
- A a different take on Bush's vision is what inspired the start of new media
- "Turning an information explosion into a knowledge explosion"
Alan Turing
- 1943
- A mathematician from Cambridge who helped to build the Colossus computers
- Invented the "turing machine", a theoretical machine that can solve any computable problem
- Also came up with the "turing test" which basically asks "can a computer communicating via printer fool a person into believing it is human?"
- The "test" inspired the start of the annual Loebner Prize for Chatterbots
- Early computers were similar to calculators; all they could do was "crunch numbers"; no one noticed they could also be used to manipulate text
- Nowadays they mostly deal with words (ie. email, documents, voice recognition)
- Turing wrote "Computing Machinery & Intelligence" where he lays out the "Turing Test"
- Important because he recognized the computer as a "thinking" machine
I think the changes in scale are the most impressive when looking at the history of computers and networking. Within fifty years the most advanced computers of the time period have gone from the size of entire rooms, to a device that fits easily in our pockets. It will be interesting to see at what point scale is something that can not be developed any longer. We will get to a point where we will either continue to require a hand held device or we wont. They can't get much smaller.
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