CS 010 Summary

Part IV: Theories about how computers can change humanity

(Specifically, those of V. Bush, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, and Steven Johnson.)

Relevent and Personal Favorite Quotations:

"A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed."

-V. Bush, "As We May Think"

"Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form."

-Gary Wolf, "The Curse of Xanadu"

"people-to-people communication through shared knowledge must be possible for groups of all sizes, interacting electronically with as much ease as they do now in person."
"the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy, and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines, leaving humans to provide the inspiration and intuition."

-Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web

"The story of the desktop's circuitous route to popular success--from the R&D lab to Windows 95--is by now a familiar one. Like most Silicon Valley sagas, it begins with a plucky band of outcasts and dreamers, and ends with Bill Gates conquering the planet."
"this book is an extended attempt to look at the object-world of techonology" as culture.
"new type of criticism, and a working example of this criticism going about its business."

-Steven Johnson, Interface Culture

Bush's memex	Nelson's Xanadu	Berners-Lee's semantic web
helps process info	storage	communication
cyborg	the only way to create	collaboration
trails	transclusion	xml as rosetta stone

The innovations in the switch from the interface of scrolls to the interface of codex books:
-mark pages
-portable in use
-page numbers
-table of contents
-index
-concordance
-red lettering
-number scriptural verse
-fist

move back to:

logic/truth tables

html and binary.