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Infoculture: the Smithsonian book of information age inventions
An illustrated look at the technologies that shape contemporary life features more than 250 color and black-and-white photographs and a text that discusses the history, origins, development, and reception of ubiquitous popular technologies. 15,000 first printing.
- GenresTechnology
Library Binding
First published January 10, 1994
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August 31, 2014
A. Summary: Infoculture is the world of information, communication, and entertainment machines (technologically mediated information). These machines and the social structure that they are a part of and define our culture. The building blocks of the infoculture include new forms of communication (telegraph), organizations that process information (military, government), and the consumer who helps define and use the new technology. The consumer brings certain attitudes toward new technology (1) great expectations--the electrical sublime (2) democratic technologies will allow the individuals power and autonomy (3) technical solutions to social problems.
B. Criticism: Lubar’s categories (communication, entertainment, information) are an unsatisfactory organizing principle. Many technologies fit in all the categories (computer, phone). Particularly today I believe that these categories are blending into one.
II. Communication
A. Words
1. Newspapers: Not until after the Revolution did the people believe that a wide circulation of information was a good thing. The informed citizen was essential to democracy. The postal system was a key element in keeping people informed.
2. Books: Became very popular in the 19th. Reading itself changed from a devotional exercise (reading a religious tract) to an entertainment form. Technological innovations in book publishing made this possible.
3. Telegraph: This changed the idea of news. Timely stories from the nation were available. The stories were shorter and writers opinions were eliminated to reduce transmission cost. Associated Press forms (1848)
4. Magazines: These boomed at the turn of the 20th due to an expansion in advertising.
5. Word processing: Began in a limited form in the 1950s with text editors for programming computers. The continuing quest today remains the paperless office. Desktop publishing in the 1980s. Hypertext in the 1990s.
B. Pictures (objective to subjective)
1. Photography: Began with Daguerre in 1937. This idea fit nicely into industrializing America. They were believed to be objective representations of reality. As people traveled more and families split apart people wanted picture keepsakes (memories)
2. Photojournalism: This field develops with the inclusion of pictures in magazines and newspapers
3. Electronic pictures: This began in the 1950s with EDSAC and Whirlwind CRT screens. As computers became more effective at creating and manipulating digital images pictures became subjective.
C. Telegraph
1. Morse telegraph (1837): A battery at one end of a loop of wire and a bell at the other end. The transmitter (key) is an on-off switch (holding it down completes the circuit and the bell rings). Dots and dashes represents the letters. A signal can only be transmitted a few miles. Relays are used to re-transmit the message.
2. Unity: Many people thought that the telegraph would unify not only the country but the world (transatlantic cable). Instead it was used as a weapon of war in the Civil War.
D. Wireless Telegraphy
1. Transmitters: Whenever there is a change in electric current (as when a spark jumps across a gap) electromagnetic waves are emitted. When these waves (which travel through space at the speed of light) hit another wire they cause a current to flow in that wire at the same frequency of the 1st wire. Early transmitters were spark gaps that emitted electromagnetic waves of many frequencies. Later transmitters which used vacuum tubes sent out a narrow range of frequencies.
2. Receivers: Lee de Forest and Fessenden had great patent disputes over receivers. These were diodes which sensed the transmitted signal.
E. Telephone
1. Multiplex: This was the attempt to send more than one telegraph message over a single wire. After Bell invented one he realized that he could transmit voice. A few hours after he filed his patent papers Elisha Gray also filed a patent. Bell received the patent 14 Feb 1876.
2. Telephone: Sends a complex signal whose current reflects the exact air pressure of the original sounds. The sending telephone uses a microphone to convert the changing air pressure of the voice into a electrical current. At the receiving end the current drives the electromagnet which makes the speaker vibrate. These vibrations reproduce the original sound. All phones are connected to a central switching station. The pulses dialed select the lines in which to connect the call to. 7 digits can reach 10,000,000
3. Phone system: Built by Bell and taken over by AT&T. This included phone rentals, women switchboard operators, improved technologies like amplifiers (repeaters) that could transmit a signal call cross country.
4. Beyond telephones: modems, fax, ATMs, cellular phones, packet switching, the internet, fiber optics
III. Entertainment
A. Recorded Sound
1. Phonograph: Edison in 1877 combined the microphone, speaker, and stylus into a basic phonograph. He thought that the applications would be limitless (toys, music, business). Records began to be sold in 1902. In the 1920s it received competition from radio and player pianos
2. Music industry: Music became a commodity and industry. The music itself began to change (Crooning in the 1930s--a soft style singing). The 78 rpm helped capture the Blues and spread it throughout America. The 45s came in 1949 for recording one song. The LP was introduced in 1948 and was quickly adopted for Classical music. High-Fi was the catchphrase of the 1950s
B. Movies: In 1894 Edison invented the Kinetescope. There was a fear that movies would corrupt minds. 1915 feature film Birth of a Nation (celebrated the KKK). Sound in the early 1920s (Jazz Singer). In 1935 color was added.
C. Radio
1. Radio Stations: Radio was initially broadcast by amateurs. The first station was KDKA in Pittsburgh. Distance was what intrigued many early listeners (how far away could they get a station?).
2. Radio Programs: By the 1930s most homes had radios. Amos & Andy was a popular nationwide show. New and Music filled the airwaves. The big question was who was going to pay for it--the answer advertising.
3. Transistor: This is a semiconductor device that can be an amplifier, oscillator, rectifier, or a high speed switch. These were a great improvement over the vacuum tube because they were smaller, lighter, cooler, and used less power. The next step was the integrated circuit. The transistor dramatically reduced the size of the radio.
D. Television
1. TV Stations: RCA unveiled its system at the 1939 World’s Fair. It took off sharply after the war. 100s of stations sprang up across the country
2. TV Programs: TV news broke new ground with the army-McCarthy hearings. Ike’s 1952 campaign was the first televised campaign. Sports: Roller Derby, college football, baseball. Game shows.
3. Beyon television: HDTV, VCR, video games
IV. Information
A. Before Computers (pre WWII)
1. Pascal, Liebnitz, Babbage (Difference Engine, Analytical Engine), Ada Lovelace, Scheutz
2. Herman Hollerith (engineer) and the 1890 census
a) His punched card machines received much use from insurance companies
b) Other users included: RR, government, and New Dealers for Social Security distribution in 1935.
3. Howard Aiken built the Harvard Mark I in 1944. This computer worked on ballistics during the war.
4. George Stibitz (from Bell) created a series of computers using telephone relays in 1937. Called the Model K (because it was built on the kitchen table) this machine could add two binary digits.
5. Claude Shannon (MIT masters thesis 1937) showed that Boolean algebra could be used to design electric switching circuits
6. Konrad Zuse (Germany) built the Z1 to the Z4 beginning in 1938. These performed binary arithmetic and were unknown in US and England.
7. John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry (physics professors) built computers from 1939-42)
a) The ABC computer was designed to solve equations found in physics problems
b) They built a digital binary machine that was never fully operational (it had memory and vacuum tubes)
c) A 1973 court case claimed that the ENIAC was derived from the ABC
8. The ENIAC was built at the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania (1943)
a) John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert (engineers)
b) This was an all electrical computer
c) Mauchly worked on Bush’s analyzer and had corresponded with Atanasoff
9. Codebreaking
a) The German Enigma encoded messages
b) Alan Turing developed the Colossus to help break these codes. This was part of a practical manifestation of Turing’s theoretical Turing machine.
c) American designers copied the Colossus and developed the Bombes (supported by the Navy)
B. Five strengths of post WWII computer development (late 40’s to 1960)
1. John Von Neumann (Princeton mathematician) was the guiding force behind first generation computers
a) His First Draft of a Report on the Edvac (1945) outlined the basic structure of a binary computer (ALU, control unit, memory, input, output)
b) Neumanns computer was called the IAS (named after the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton)
c) Other computers built from this model were the JOHNIAC, MANIAC, and the 701 defense calculator
2. In the late 1940s Jay Forrester developed the Whirlwind which could operate in real time
a) This computer was initially designed as a flight simulator and therefore it had to process events in real time
b) Forrester was the first to use magnetic core memories (each bit was stored in a donut-shaped ring as a magnetic charge)
c) He used a CRT for output
d) In 1949 a new system (SAGE) was built as an electronic defense against Russian bombers. It was capable of directing radar and planes. It cost 61 billion.
3. Manchester Mark I
a) Based on the work of Neumann and the Colossus
b) Maurice Wilkes built the EDSAC in 1949
4. Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation forms in 1948
a) Totalisator invests in them
b) BINAC, a small, slow computer is built for Northrop Aircraft Company in 1949
c) Remington-Rand purchased the company in 1950.
d) UNIVAC I was delivered to the census bureau in 1951. It also predicted the 1952 election.
5. IBM was initially slow to enter the computer business because Thomas Watson Sr., the president thought that the computer would take away from his punched card business
a) In 1953 the IBM 650 was introduced. It was the first computer so popular that it had organized production lines.
b) This was the machine around which the discipline of computer science was built because universities could rent them at a great discount.
c) In 1962 IBM produces a computer to sell to business and factory, the System/360 family.
d) Other companies made their computers plug-compatible with the 360.
C. Cultural fear of computers in the 1960s.
1. The computer itself becomes part of everyday culture (‘computer age’ was coined, computer dating)
2. There were tremendous fears of Big Brother like data banks. Large data banks were actually set up by the IRS, FBI, and credit card companies.
3. These fears were manifested in movies like 2001 (1961) and the Andromeda Strain (1971)
4. The words ‘Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate’ became a symbol of alienation and fear.
D. Computers at work
1. Computers fit easily into the structure of the workplace
a) Payroll and billing were the most common early computer applications
b) Tasks began to be reorganized around the computer (ex. Barcoding)
c) Some jobs were deskilled (some secretaries became data entry clerks), some middle manager jobs were eliminated
d) Other jobs were reskilled (assemble line workers learned new computer skills)
e) Computers fit into the long process of automating factory work. (Computer numerical control)
2. The idea of robots to replace workers became popular
a) This was a failed idea. UNIMATE (the first industrial robot) and the General Motors plant at Lordstown, Ohio.
b) Boring jobs led workers to turn to sabotage, drugs, and absenteeism
c) Yet, the idea continued through the 1980s with the new phrase “lights-out” factories.
d) In 1982 1 billion was spent on robotics and computer manufacturing
e) But robotics never took off and by the late 80s most robot producers were out of business
3. Today many people use computers at their jobs and not lose their jobs to computers
E. Computers become ubiquitous
1. Time sharing
a) This was invented at MIT in the late 1950s
b) Smaller companies could buy time on larger computers (paying per minute)
c) This dovetailed with another new technology, the modem
d) Time sharing expanded computer use and this allowed for the development of more powerful computers
2. Integrated circuits
a) All the elements of an electronic circuit were contained on one chip of silicon
b) Jack Kilby first patented the IC (Texas Instruments) in 1959.
c) Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor independently invented the IC
d) They were used in the space program and consumer products.
e) Ken Olsen at DEC introduced the PDP-8 in 1965 (minicomputer)
3. Microprocessor
a) This was the key invention that made personal computing possible
b) Ted Hoff designed a general purpose IC in 1969. He was a designer at Intel
c) Automobiles were the first and most widespread users of these microprocessors (engine control computer maintained the proper mixture of fuel and air). Other car uses were the antilock brake. These were invisible technologies.
d) The microprocessor became best known with PC’s
(1) Altair (January 1975) on the cover of Popular Electronics set off the boom
(2) Radio Shack, Commodore, and Apple began productions of their own PC’s
(3) Software like VisiCalc helped sell many Apple II’s
(4) In 1981 IBM enters the market and the IBM PC becomes the standard. 1984 the MacIntosh becomes its competitor (GUI)
e) People suggested that the PC would free people and make the world more democratic
(1) A 1984 MacIntosh add suggested utopian democratic ideals. Repressed workers were freed by a woman running in a MacIntosh t-shirt. She threw a hammer at a computer screen showing Big Brother
(2) However PC enthusiasts overestimated the limited capabilities of early machines (the boss still told you what to do with it)
(3) Technological revolutions tend to reinforce the existing power structure
(4) In the 1990s new microprocessors increased the power of the PC
(5) Spreadsheets helped stimulate the entrepreneurial revolution of the 1980s
F. Beyond Computers: automations, robots, artificial intelligence, cyborgs.
B. Criticism: Lubar’s categories (communication, entertainment, information) are an unsatisfactory organizing principle. Many technologies fit in all the categories (computer, phone). Particularly today I believe that these categories are blending into one.
II. Communication
A. Words
1. Newspapers: Not until after the Revolution did the people believe that a wide circulation of information was a good thing. The informed citizen was essential to democracy. The postal system was a key element in keeping people informed.
2. Books: Became very popular in the 19th. Reading itself changed from a devotional exercise (reading a religious tract) to an entertainment form. Technological innovations in book publishing made this possible.
3. Telegraph: This changed the idea of news. Timely stories from the nation were available. The stories were shorter and writers opinions were eliminated to reduce transmission cost. Associated Press forms (1848)
4. Magazines: These boomed at the turn of the 20th due to an expansion in advertising.
5. Word processing: Began in a limited form in the 1950s with text editors for programming computers. The continuing quest today remains the paperless office. Desktop publishing in the 1980s. Hypertext in the 1990s.
B. Pictures (objective to subjective)
1. Photography: Began with Daguerre in 1937. This idea fit nicely into industrializing America. They were believed to be objective representations of reality. As people traveled more and families split apart people wanted picture keepsakes (memories)
2. Photojournalism: This field develops with the inclusion of pictures in magazines and newspapers
3. Electronic pictures: This began in the 1950s with EDSAC and Whirlwind CRT screens. As computers became more effective at creating and manipulating digital images pictures became subjective.
C. Telegraph
1. Morse telegraph (1837): A battery at one end of a loop of wire and a bell at the other end. The transmitter (key) is an on-off switch (holding it down completes the circuit and the bell rings). Dots and dashes represents the letters. A signal can only be transmitted a few miles. Relays are used to re-transmit the message.
2. Unity: Many people thought that the telegraph would unify not only the country but the world (transatlantic cable). Instead it was used as a weapon of war in the Civil War.
D. Wireless Telegraphy
1. Transmitters: Whenever there is a change in electric current (as when a spark jumps across a gap) electromagnetic waves are emitted. When these waves (which travel through space at the speed of light) hit another wire they cause a current to flow in that wire at the same frequency of the 1st wire. Early transmitters were spark gaps that emitted electromagnetic waves of many frequencies. Later transmitters which used vacuum tubes sent out a narrow range of frequencies.
2. Receivers: Lee de Forest and Fessenden had great patent disputes over receivers. These were diodes which sensed the transmitted signal.
E. Telephone
1. Multiplex: This was the attempt to send more than one telegraph message over a single wire. After Bell invented one he realized that he could transmit voice. A few hours after he filed his patent papers Elisha Gray also filed a patent. Bell received the patent 14 Feb 1876.
2. Telephone: Sends a complex signal whose current reflects the exact air pressure of the original sounds. The sending telephone uses a microphone to convert the changing air pressure of the voice into a electrical current. At the receiving end the current drives the electromagnet which makes the speaker vibrate. These vibrations reproduce the original sound. All phones are connected to a central switching station. The pulses dialed select the lines in which to connect the call to. 7 digits can reach 10,000,000
3. Phone system: Built by Bell and taken over by AT&T. This included phone rentals, women switchboard operators, improved technologies like amplifiers (repeaters) that could transmit a signal call cross country.
4. Beyond telephones: modems, fax, ATMs, cellular phones, packet switching, the internet, fiber optics
III. Entertainment
A. Recorded Sound
1. Phonograph: Edison in 1877 combined the microphone, speaker, and stylus into a basic phonograph. He thought that the applications would be limitless (toys, music, business). Records began to be sold in 1902. In the 1920s it received competition from radio and player pianos
2. Music industry: Music became a commodity and industry. The music itself began to change (Crooning in the 1930s--a soft style singing). The 78 rpm helped capture the Blues and spread it throughout America. The 45s came in 1949 for recording one song. The LP was introduced in 1948 and was quickly adopted for Classical music. High-Fi was the catchphrase of the 1950s
B. Movies: In 1894 Edison invented the Kinetescope. There was a fear that movies would corrupt minds. 1915 feature film Birth of a Nation (celebrated the KKK). Sound in the early 1920s (Jazz Singer). In 1935 color was added.
C. Radio
1. Radio Stations: Radio was initially broadcast by amateurs. The first station was KDKA in Pittsburgh. Distance was what intrigued many early listeners (how far away could they get a station?).
2. Radio Programs: By the 1930s most homes had radios. Amos & Andy was a popular nationwide show. New and Music filled the airwaves. The big question was who was going to pay for it--the answer advertising.
3. Transistor: This is a semiconductor device that can be an amplifier, oscillator, rectifier, or a high speed switch. These were a great improvement over the vacuum tube because they were smaller, lighter, cooler, and used less power. The next step was the integrated circuit. The transistor dramatically reduced the size of the radio.
D. Television
1. TV Stations: RCA unveiled its system at the 1939 World’s Fair. It took off sharply after the war. 100s of stations sprang up across the country
2. TV Programs: TV news broke new ground with the army-McCarthy hearings. Ike’s 1952 campaign was the first televised campaign. Sports: Roller Derby, college football, baseball. Game shows.
3. Beyon television: HDTV, VCR, video games
IV. Information
A. Before Computers (pre WWII)
1. Pascal, Liebnitz, Babbage (Difference Engine, Analytical Engine), Ada Lovelace, Scheutz
2. Herman Hollerith (engineer) and the 1890 census
a) His punched card machines received much use from insurance companies
b) Other users included: RR, government, and New Dealers for Social Security distribution in 1935.
3. Howard Aiken built the Harvard Mark I in 1944. This computer worked on ballistics during the war.
4. George Stibitz (from Bell) created a series of computers using telephone relays in 1937. Called the Model K (because it was built on the kitchen table) this machine could add two binary digits.
5. Claude Shannon (MIT masters thesis 1937) showed that Boolean algebra could be used to design electric switching circuits
6. Konrad Zuse (Germany) built the Z1 to the Z4 beginning in 1938. These performed binary arithmetic and were unknown in US and England.
7. John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry (physics professors) built computers from 1939-42)
a) The ABC computer was designed to solve equations found in physics problems
b) They built a digital binary machine that was never fully operational (it had memory and vacuum tubes)
c) A 1973 court case claimed that the ENIAC was derived from the ABC
8. The ENIAC was built at the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania (1943)
a) John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert (engineers)
b) This was an all electrical computer
c) Mauchly worked on Bush’s analyzer and had corresponded with Atanasoff
9. Codebreaking
a) The German Enigma encoded messages
b) Alan Turing developed the Colossus to help break these codes. This was part of a practical manifestation of Turing’s theoretical Turing machine.
c) American designers copied the Colossus and developed the Bombes (supported by the Navy)
B. Five strengths of post WWII computer development (late 40’s to 1960)
1. John Von Neumann (Princeton mathematician) was the guiding force behind first generation computers
a) His First Draft of a Report on the Edvac (1945) outlined the basic structure of a binary computer (ALU, control unit, memory, input, output)
b) Neumanns computer was called the IAS (named after the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton)
c) Other computers built from this model were the JOHNIAC, MANIAC, and the 701 defense calculator
2. In the late 1940s Jay Forrester developed the Whirlwind which could operate in real time
a) This computer was initially designed as a flight simulator and therefore it had to process events in real time
b) Forrester was the first to use magnetic core memories (each bit was stored in a donut-shaped ring as a magnetic charge)
c) He used a CRT for output
d) In 1949 a new system (SAGE) was built as an electronic defense against Russian bombers. It was capable of directing radar and planes. It cost 61 billion.
3. Manchester Mark I
a) Based on the work of Neumann and the Colossus
b) Maurice Wilkes built the EDSAC in 1949
4. Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation forms in 1948
a) Totalisator invests in them
b) BINAC, a small, slow computer is built for Northrop Aircraft Company in 1949
c) Remington-Rand purchased the company in 1950.
d) UNIVAC I was delivered to the census bureau in 1951. It also predicted the 1952 election.
5. IBM was initially slow to enter the computer business because Thomas Watson Sr., the president thought that the computer would take away from his punched card business
a) In 1953 the IBM 650 was introduced. It was the first computer so popular that it had organized production lines.
b) This was the machine around which the discipline of computer science was built because universities could rent them at a great discount.
c) In 1962 IBM produces a computer to sell to business and factory, the System/360 family.
d) Other companies made their computers plug-compatible with the 360.
C. Cultural fear of computers in the 1960s.
1. The computer itself becomes part of everyday culture (‘computer age’ was coined, computer dating)
2. There were tremendous fears of Big Brother like data banks. Large data banks were actually set up by the IRS, FBI, and credit card companies.
3. These fears were manifested in movies like 2001 (1961) and the Andromeda Strain (1971)
4. The words ‘Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate’ became a symbol of alienation and fear.
D. Computers at work
1. Computers fit easily into the structure of the workplace
a) Payroll and billing were the most common early computer applications
b) Tasks began to be reorganized around the computer (ex. Barcoding)
c) Some jobs were deskilled (some secretaries became data entry clerks), some middle manager jobs were eliminated
d) Other jobs were reskilled (assemble line workers learned new computer skills)
e) Computers fit into the long process of automating factory work. (Computer numerical control)
2. The idea of robots to replace workers became popular
a) This was a failed idea. UNIMATE (the first industrial robot) and the General Motors plant at Lordstown, Ohio.
b) Boring jobs led workers to turn to sabotage, drugs, and absenteeism
c) Yet, the idea continued through the 1980s with the new phrase “lights-out” factories.
d) In 1982 1 billion was spent on robotics and computer manufacturing
e) But robotics never took off and by the late 80s most robot producers were out of business
3. Today many people use computers at their jobs and not lose their jobs to computers
E. Computers become ubiquitous
1. Time sharing
a) This was invented at MIT in the late 1950s
b) Smaller companies could buy time on larger computers (paying per minute)
c) This dovetailed with another new technology, the modem
d) Time sharing expanded computer use and this allowed for the development of more powerful computers
2. Integrated circuits
a) All the elements of an electronic circuit were contained on one chip of silicon
b) Jack Kilby first patented the IC (Texas Instruments) in 1959.
c) Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor independently invented the IC
d) They were used in the space program and consumer products.
e) Ken Olsen at DEC introduced the PDP-8 in 1965 (minicomputer)
3. Microprocessor
a) This was the key invention that made personal computing possible
b) Ted Hoff designed a general purpose IC in 1969. He was a designer at Intel
c) Automobiles were the first and most widespread users of these microprocessors (engine control computer maintained the proper mixture of fuel and air). Other car uses were the antilock brake. These were invisible technologies.
d) The microprocessor became best known with PC’s
(1) Altair (January 1975) on the cover of Popular Electronics set off the boom
(2) Radio Shack, Commodore, and Apple began productions of their own PC’s
(3) Software like VisiCalc helped sell many Apple II’s
(4) In 1981 IBM enters the market and the IBM PC becomes the standard. 1984 the MacIntosh becomes its competitor (GUI)
e) People suggested that the PC would free people and make the world more democratic
(1) A 1984 MacIntosh add suggested utopian democratic ideals. Repressed workers were freed by a woman running in a MacIntosh t-shirt. She threw a hammer at a computer screen showing Big Brother
(2) However PC enthusiasts overestimated the limited capabilities of early machines (the boss still told you what to do with it)
(3) Technological revolutions tend to reinforce the existing power structure
(4) In the 1990s new microprocessors increased the power of the PC
(5) Spreadsheets helped stimulate the entrepreneurial revolution of the 1980s
F. Beyond Computers: automations, robots, artificial intelligence, cyborgs.
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