IT to digital technology

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Those who are just acquainted with the information technology industry often lack a small, but understandable, interesting and simple insight into history. Since September I have been actively studying the IT industry . In order for me to better understand the pre-digital information technology, I wrote this short essay.

For the last forty years, we have been strongly associating information technologies with computers, various devices, networks, and program development. However, an application for vacation and his trip to the tables of managers, as well as the cry of “Help!” In a dark alley - this is also all the information and technologies for its processing and distribution.
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To a large extent, our knowledge of the past is based on miraculously surviving fragments. And even with modern technology, our knowledge is overwhelmed only by speculation about what really happened. First, the story was determined by the level of development of information technology. Secondly, the same information technologies were used to regularly rewrite this very story.

Revolution number 1. Speech and writing.

About 150–200 thousand years ago we received a good and free way to create and exchange information - speech. First, we began to distinguish concepts from objects (in speech, a stone is any stone, not a concrete cobblestone), and second, we separated objects from their properties (not only a flower, but also a sunset can be red). Hi, classes and objects!

The information is gradually accumulated in the operational memory of people, but there is no reliable mechanism for transmitting it to future generations. Here mythology is born, as a completely new category of high abstraction of thinking and collective consciousness. Immediately, people learned to “share” this knowledge with free access. Improved reliability. After all, if, for example, Nestor's grandfather died, without having managed to tell some history that is useful for the skills and morality of the younger generations, he could be replaced by some other grandfather on the hand.

There were more interesting stories, buffer overflow became regular - a similar situation is still typical. Try to remember right now, for example, at least a couple of your favorite recipes. Or some really important information: what and how much money have you spent over the past two days?

The logical consequence was the emergence of writing (approximately V millennium BC - Danube prototype or writing of the Vinca culture ). Writing made it possible to make data storage non-volatile, but also exposed the problem of incompatibility of formats — several writing systems stand out that develop independently of each other.

In ancient times, writing remained the lot of narrowly specialized groups - priests, rulers, merchants. In general, asymmetry is very typical for any information, and information always has an owner. There can be no information in itself, otherwise it is just physical phenomena. Important information even more so has owners who try to protect really important information from the curious and get a profit on this fact (for example, using insider information to make money on the stock market).

An interesting fact is that in the development of writing one can clearly trace the movement from hieroglyphs-symbols (read: icons) to abstract letters, which separately mean nothing - the path that took several thousand more years. It is impossible not to mention the hieroglyphs of Egypt (the beginning of the 4th millennium BC) and the Sumerian writing (the end of the 3rd millennium BC). The writing of the modern type, namely, the Latin and Greek alphabets were created only in the 9th — 5th centuries BC. The spread of writing was greatly facilitated by military campaigns and the conquests of that time, in particular, by Alexander the Great. The technology of storing and using books in libraries gradually improved, became more similar to how we imagine the library today, the processing and storage structure was formed, the books became available to a wider range of people.

Simultaneously with the development of writing, there is an awareness of the value of knowledge and the transfer of experience as such. As a result, a large number of books are collected in public libraries, and the principles of systematization, labels, catalogs, page numbering (read: file system) are formed. And, most importantly, we are witnessing the emergence of a special person engaged solely in rewriting existing books, that is, professionally engaged in piracy (probably no copyright law then existed yet). Approximately 400 BC. in China, paper was invented, and two hundred years after that, primitive attempts to replicate knowledge with the help of impressions on fabric were known, and the circulation, for example, of some paintings reached 400 thousand copies .

At the same time, in Europe for a long time the books were reproduced exclusively by professional scribes, and we can only hope that they did their work unbiased and infallibly.

Now cloud technologies allow storing unnecessary information also on other people's computers. It used to be wrong. Previously, people individually knew very little, and, even worse, there were few such knowledgeable people. Quite real was the danger of losing even this essential for survival, but small in volume knowledge. Therefore, in its development culture cultivated the habits of preserving and multiplying the collected. The first cloud repositories were libraries, then this function was performed by religious institutions.


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Revolution number 2. Printing.

In the years 1452-1455 Gutenberg worked on the famous Bible. He probably did not even know that he used for this the first automated system of multiple copying of information on paper. Although the circulation was only 185 copies - a colossal, seemingly unattainable, result for those times. The cost of books has decreased, but they were still expensive and only temples and other large institutions could buy a book. A century later in Russia, Ivan Fyodorov published his first book, The Apostle and Primer (or, more precisely, it was called the alphabet “for the sake of early infant learning”). Christianity in Europe and Russia, of course, had a decisive influence on the cultural and political environment, so at the same time the Bible was translated and published in the national languages, primarily German and English. The growth of literacy and the availability of education could not but lead to social changes, which, in turn, led to changes on the map of Europe in the seventeenth century.

The development of printing has cheapened and accelerated with time the publication so much that it became possible to quickly and massively disseminate information - newspapers appeared. The oldest newspaper, King Pao (Metropolitan Herald), was published in China in 911 and still exists. In Europe, newspapers were distributed in 1610 in Basel, in Switzerland and a little later in the southern part of Germany. Frankfurt was the center of interaction between the upper and lower Germany from the 15th century; therefore, by 1619, three newspapers began to appear regularly at once, and in 1622 a publication appeared in Londna. In France a little later - in 1631, but it was a full-fledged weekly edition on 4 pages of commerce, wars, court chronicles and diplomatic news.

January 5, 1665 in the same France began to publish the first journal «Journal des Savants», for scientists and the intellectual elite of Europe. Reading and “being aware of” ceased to be a privilege of the elect, and the massive and constantly growing circulation of newspapers were the first steps towards accelerating the obsolescence of information and knowledge.

As soon as the problem of preserving knowledge was solved, the smartest people understood the influence of the information environment on social and political events, and began to look for ways to quickly transfer the necessary knowledge over long distances.

The next two centuries, printing has become the main way of creating, storing and disseminating information throughout the world, right up to the appearance of the telegraph in the 30s of the XIX century, and then the invention of Popov radio in 1895. But this innovation, primarily due to the technical requirements (availability of a receiver and a power supply network), took many years to reach an audience. A similar situation occurred with television: although the Russian scientist Rosing made the first program in 1911, regular television programs began only in the mid-thirties. However, now we can not imagine life without these two familiar sources of information.

Technical revolutions changed the media and technologies — better printing, color printing, photo, then film, then video, but the essence remained unchanged until the appearance of digital media, when it became possible to quickly and simply replicate and distribute any data, and Consequently, with the advent of the Internet as a global infrastructure (or even better to say already meta-structure) of creating, storing, processing and delivering information - it became possible to manage information “infusions” with unthinkable until then performance and effectiveness.