In the 1980s, Howard Rheingold wrote Tools for Thought,
tracing the history of the development of modern computing from Charles
Babbage through to Alan Kay. In doing so, he offered a vision of what
computers might be in the future that turned out to be remarkably
prescient:
“The forms that cultural innovations took in the past can help us try
to forecast the future – but the forms of the past can only give us
a glimpse, not a detailed picture, of what will be. The developments
that seem the most important to contemporaries, like blimps and
telegraphs, become humorous anachronisms to their grandchildren. As
soon as something looks like a good model for predicting the way life
is going to be from now on, the unexpected happens. The lesson, if
anything, is that we should get used to expecting the unexpected.
“We seem to be experiencing one of those rare pivotal times between
epochs, before a new social order emerges, when a great many
experiments briefly flourish. If the experiences of past generations
are to furnish any guidance, the best attitude to adopt might have
less to do with picking the most likely successors to today’s
institutions than with encouraging an atmosphere of experimentation.
“Hints to the shape of the emerging order can be gleaned from the uses
people are beginning to think up for computers and networks. But it is
a bit like watching the old films of flying machines of the early
twentieth century, the kind that get a lot of laughs whenever they are
shown to modern audiences because some of the spiral-winged or
twelve-winged jobs look so ridiculous from the perspective of the jet
age. Yet everyone can see how very close the spiral-winged contraption
had come close to the principle of the helicopter.
“The dispersal of powerful computer technology to large segments of
the world’s population, and the phasing-in of the comprehensive
information-processing global nervous system that seems to be
abuilding, are already propelling us toward a social transformation
that we know very little about, except that it will be far different
from previous transformations because the tool that will trigger the
change is so different from previous tools.”
The full text is available online; it’s a great read, not just as
a history of an industry but as a historical artefact in its own right. #