| Computer: A History Of The Information Machine |
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''Computer: A History of the Information Machine '', is a 1996 book by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. It offers an overview of the History Of Computing which ends with the rise of the World Wide Web in the mid- 1990s . TABLE OF CONTENTS
Selections from Chapter 12 This book (published just a few years after the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web) is notable as one of the first to discuss the impact of the then-new World Wide Web on computer use. In particular, the authors discuss in "Chapter 12: From the World Brain to The World Wide Web " the limited use of the Internet until the early 1990s , noting: :During the second half of the 1980s , the joys of 'surfing the net,' began to excite the interest of people beyond the professional computer-using communities However, the existing computer networks were largely in government, higher education and business. They were not a free good and were not open to hobbyists or private firms that did not have access to a host computer. To fill this gap, a number of firms such as CompuServe , Prodigy , GEnie , and America Online sprang up to provide low cost network access [... While these networks gave access to Internet for E-mail (typically on a pay-per-message basis), they did not give the ordinary citizen access to the full range of the Internet, or to the glories of Gopherspace or the World Wide Web . In a country whose Constitution enshrines freedom of information, most of its citizens were effectively locked out of the library of the future. The Internet was no longer a technical issue, but a political one. The problem of giving ordinary Americans network access had exercised Senator Al Gore since the late 1970s . In 1990 he was the author of the'' High Performance Computing Act '', which proposed the creation of a high-speed fiber optic network that would produce enormous leverage for the information economy of the twenty-first century (1996:298). They also note the impact of the '' High Performance Computing And Communication Act Of 1991 '' (commonly referred to as ''The Gore Bill )'': :In the early 1990s the Internet was big news...In the fall of 1990 there were just 313,000 computers on the Internet; by 1996, there were close to 10 million. The networking idea became politicized during the 1992 Clinton - Gore election campaign, where the rhetoric of the ' Information Highway ' captured the public imagination. On taking office in 1993, the new administration set in place a range of government initiatives for a National Information Infrastructure aimed at ensuring that all American citizens ultimately gain access to the new networks (1996:283). REVIEWS According to the "IEEE Annals of the History of Computing", Campbell-Kelly and Aspray's account is "a highly readable, broad-brush picture of the development of computing, or rather of the computer industry, from its beginning to the present" which "sets a new standard for the history of computing." {Link without Title} . EXTERNAL LINKS
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