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Information Age
Information Age
• (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, Silicon Age, or New Media
Age)
ayeeballe@dorsu202304
I. Historical Period
• Mid-20th century
• Industrial Revolution, to an economy centered on information technology
• linked to the development of the transistor in 1947,
• the optical amplifier in 1957, and
• Unix time, which began on January 1, 1970
• and serves as the basis for Coordinated Universal Time and the Network Time
Protocol.
II. Early Developments
• Information-intensive industry
• Industry has become more information-intensive while less labor-
and capital-intensive.
• This has left important implications for the workforce, as workers have
become increasingly productive as the value of their labor decreases.
• For the system of capitalism itself, the value of labor decreases, the
value of capital increases.
V. Innovations
• Transistors
• The onset of the Information Age can be associated with the
development of transistor technology.
• The concept of a field-effect transistor was first theorized by Julius
Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925.
• The first practical transistor was the point-contact transistor, invented
by the engineers Walter Houser Brattain and John Bardeen while
working for William Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947.
• Shockley's research team also invented the bipolar junction
transistor in 1952.
• The most widely used type of transistor is the metal–oxide–
semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), invented by Mohamed
M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1960.
Innovations
• Computers
• The invention of the transistor enabled the era of mainframe
computers (1950s–1970s), typified by the IBM 360.
• room-sized computers provided data calculation and manipulation that
was much faster than humanly possible
• but were expensive to buy and maintain, so were initially limited to a
few scientific institutions, large corporations, and government agencies.
• Along with electronic arcade machines and home video game
consoles pioneered by Nolan Bushnell in the 1970s, the development
of personal computers like the Commodore PET and Apple II (both in
1977) gave individuals access to the computer.
• But data sharing between individual computers was either non-existent
or largely manual, at first using punched cards and magnetic tape, and
later floppy disks.
Innovations
• Data
• The first developments for storing data were initially based on
photographs, starting with microphotography in 1851 and
then microform in the 1920s, with the ability to store documents on film,
making them much more compact.
• Magnetic-core memory was developed from the research of Frederick W.
Viehe in 1947 and An Wang at Harvard University in 1949.[44][45] With the
advent of the MOS transistor, MOS semiconductor memory was
developed by John Schmidt at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1964.
• Copper wire cables transmitting digital data connected computer
terminals and peripherals to mainframes, and special message-sharing
systems leading to email, were first developed in the 1960s.
• Independent computer-to-computer networking began with ARPANET in
1969.
• Access to the Internet improved with the invention of the World Wide
Web in 1991.
Innovations
• Personal computers
• 1976, there were several firms racing to introduce the first truly
successful commercial personal computers.
• Three machines, the Apple II, PET 2001 and TRS-80 were all released
in 1977,
• in 1977, Sord Computer Corporation released the Sord M200 Smart
Home Computer in Japan.
• Steve Wozniak (known as "Woz"), a regular visitor to Homebrew
Computer Club meetings, designed the single-board Apple I computer
• Woz and his friend Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer.
Innovations
• Optical networking
• Optical communication plays a crucial role in communication networks.
• Optical communication provides the transmission backbone for
the telecommunications and computer networks that underlie the Internet, the
foundation for the Digital Revolution and Information Age.
• The two core technologies are the optical fiber and light amplification (the optical
amplifier).
• In 1953, Bram van Heel demonstrated image transmission through bundles
of optical fibers with a transparent cladding.
• The same year, Harold Hopkins and Narinder Singh Kapany at Imperial
College succeeded in making image-transmitting bundles with over 10,000 optical
fibers,
• Gordon Gould invented the optical amplifier and the laser, and also established the
first optical telecommunications company, Optelecom, to design communication
systems.
Economy, society and culture
• Manuel Castells captures the significance of the Information Age in The Information Age:
Economy, Society and Culture
• when he writes of our global interdependence and the new relationships between
economy, state and society, what he calls "a new society-in-the-making.“
• He cautions that just because humans have dominated the material world, does not mean
that the Information Age is the end of history:
• "It is in fact, quite the opposite: history is just beginning, if by history we understand the
moment when, after millennia of a prehistoric battle with Nature, first to survive, then to
conquer it, our species has reached the level of knowledge and social organization that
will allow us to live in a predominantly social world.
• Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote about the dangers of anti-intellectualism in the
Information Age in a piece for The Atlantic.
• Although access to information has never been greater, most information is irrelevant or
insubstantial.