The discovery that relays could be used for performing Boolean operations is generally credited to computer pioneer Claude Elwood Shannon (1916–2001), whose famous 1938 M.I.T. master’s thesis was entitled “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” but a similar equivalence had been described a couple of years earlier by Japanese electrical engineer Akira Nakashima. — *location: 1068* ^ref-22005 --- (The ancient Babylonian number system based on 60 persists in our reckoning of the time in seconds and minutes.) — *location: 1296* ^ref-8390 --- The number system we use today is known as the Hindu-Arabic or Indo-Arabic. It is of Indian origin but was brought to Europe by Arab mathematicians. Of particular renown is the Persian mathematician Muhammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (from whose name we have derived the word algorithm) who wrote a book on algebra around 820 CE that used the Hindu system of counting. A Latin translation dates from about 1145 CE and was influential in hastening the transition throughout Europe from Roman numerals to our present Hindu-Arabic system. — *location: 1327* ^ref-48349 --- Sometime around 1947, the American mathematician John Wilder Tukey (1915–2000) realized that the phrase binary digit was likely to assume a much greater importance in the years ahead as computers became more prevalent. He decided to coin a new, shorter word to replace the unwieldy five syllables of binary digit. He considered bigit and binit but settled instead on the short, simple, elegant, and perfectly lovely word bit. — *location: 1588* ^ref-43871 --- information represents a choice among two or more possibilities. — *location: 1658* ^ref-34182 --- The word byte originated at IBM, probably around 1956. It had its origins in the word bite but was spelled with a y so that nobody would mistake the word for bit. Initially, a byte meant simply the number of bits in a particular data path. But by the mid-1960s, in connection with the development of IBM’s large complex of business computers called the System/360, the word byte came to mean a group of 8 bits. — *location: 1895* ^ref-62390 --- The most important Unicode transformation format is UTF-8, which is now used extensively throughout the internet. A recent statistic indicates that 97% of all webpages now use UTF-8. That’s about as much of a universal standard as you can want. Project Gutenberg’s plain-text files are all UTF-8. Windows Notepad and macOS TextEdit save files in UTF-8 by default. UTF-8 is a compromise between flexibility and concision. The biggest advantage of UTF-8 is that it’s backward compatible with ASCII. This means that a file consisting solely of 7-bit ASCII codes stored as bytes is automatically a UTF-8 file. — *location: 2249* ^ref-1100 --- In one famous incident in 1947, a moth was extracted from a relay in the Harvard Mark II computer. Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992), who had joined Aiken’s staff in 1944 and who would later become quite renowned in the field of computer programming languages, taped the moth to the computer logbook with the note “First actual case of bug being found.” — *location: 2553* ^ref-44069 --- In 1956, Shockley left Bell Labs to form Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories. He moved to Palo Alto, California, where he had grown up. His was the first such company to locate in that area. In time, other semiconductor and computer companies set up business there, and the area south of San Francisco is now informally known as Silicon Valley. — *location: 2628* ^ref-61030 --- In 1936 and 1937, English author Herbert George Wells gave a series of public lectures on a rather peculiar topic. By this time, H. G. Wells was in his early seventies. His famous science fictions novels—The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds—had been published in the 1890s and made him famous. But Wells had evolved into a public intellectual who thought deeply about social and political issues and shared these thoughts with the public. The lectures that Wells delivered in 1936 and 1937 were published in book form in 1938 under the title World Brain. In these talks, Wells proposed a type of encyclopedia, but not one that would be created for commercial purposes and sold door-to-door. This World Encyclopedia would encapsulate global knowledge in a way that had not been done before. These were precarious times in Europe: Memories of the Great War just two decades earlier were still fresh, and yet Europe seemed to be hurtling toward another continent-engulfing conflict. As an optimist and utopianist, Wells believed that science, rationality, and knowledge were the best tools to guide the world to its future. The World Encyclopedia that he proposed would contain … the ruling concepts of our social order, the outlines and main particulars in all fields of knowledge, an exact and reasonably detailed picture of our universe, a general history of the world, and … a trustworthy and complete system of reference to primary sources of knowledge. In short, it would present “a common interpretation of reality” and a “mental unification.” Such an encyclopedia would need to be continually updated with our expanding knowledge of the world, but in the process of its development, it would become … a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified, and compared… . It would constitute the material beginning of a real World Brain. — *location: 6319* ^ref-2250 --- Toward the end of WWII, Bush wrote a now famous article for the July 1945 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Entitled “As We May Think,” it in retrospect seems quite prophetic. An abridged version of the article was published in a September issue of Life magazine and accompanied by some fanciful illustrations. Like Wells, Bush focused on information and the difficulty of keeping up with it: There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear… . The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships. — *location: 6347* ^ref-63537 --- Bush conceives of a machine, a “mechanized private file and library,” an elaborate desk that stores microfilm and makes it easily accessible. And he gives it a name: “memex.” — *location: 6362* ^ref-63340 --- But most importantly, marginal notes and comments can be added to these documents and united by “associative indexing.” This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing… . Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book… . Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. — *location: 6368* ^ref-41025 --- In 1965, two decades after Bush wrote of the memex, the prospect of realizing this dream in computer form was becoming possible. Computer visionary Ted Nelson (born 1937) took up the challenge of modernizing the memex in an article entitled “Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate,” published in ACM ’65, the proceedings of a conference of the Association for Computing Machinery. — *location: 6375* ^ref-59713 --- Referencing Bush’s article on memex, Nelson asserts “The hardware is ready” for a computer realization. His proposed file structure is both ambitious and enticing, and he needs to invent a new word to describe it: Let me introduce the word “hypertext” to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it. Let me suggest that such an object and system, properly designed and administered, could have great potential for education, increasing the student’s range of choices, his sense of freedom, his motivation, and his intellectual grasp. Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world’s written knowledge. However, its internal file structure would have to be built to accept growth, change and complex informational arrangements. — *location: 6381* ^ref-6665 --- Both Wells and Bush optimistically believed that it was essential to improve our access to the knowledge and wisdom of the world. It’s hard to argue with that. But equally obvious is that providing this access doesn’t automatically propel civilization into a golden age. People tend now to be more overwhelmed than ever by the quantity of information available rather than feeling that they can manage it. — *location: 6538* ^ref-53195 ---