Computers and History

Computers and History

The digital world of today can be understood as a product of late-Victorian construction of the machinery of information organization combined with Modernist visual forms.

People living in a civilized country today live in a digital world. The children of today cannot imagine a time when computers were not widespread. Since computers have become essential for many tasks that we complete everyday, from shopping for groceries to communicating with friends and family, these kids can only picture how everything worked before the advent of the computer. This digital world is best represented by the World Wide Web, one of the most widely used applications of computers by many people.

True, computers have many, many more uses than simply that of an interface to the internet. Countless people play a myriad of computer games, some write programs, and scores more use these programs, be they a student typing a paper with Microsoft Word or a pilot switching on an autopilot program after takeoff. With every passing day, however, more and more people receive access to the internet. The evolution of the World Wide Web is what the past decade will be remembered for in terms of computers. Today, the World Wide Web is made up of billions of web sites, each different in some way from the others. Where most of these sites cannot differ, however, is that, in order for them to make some kind of an impact on the user, and therefore have a point to existing, they must make use of some sort of visual (sites with pure audio are the obvious exception to this rule). The World Wide Web organizes these different Modernist visual forms in a format which is completely new.

According to Dr. Simon Cook, “In the nineteenth century a premium was first set upon the development of technologies of memory.”[1] Cook goes on to elaborate, saying that as the nineteenth century came to a close, new forms of information organization, such as laboratories, photographs, and the cinema, came to replace older, less streamlined versions of organization, such as museums and the natural history cabinet. This progression has continued to this day, as the World Wide Web represents the newest form of information organization.

But what kind of information does the World Wide Web organize? Most fundamentally, of course, text is stored on the web pages, which transforms it into hypertext.