IT to digital technology


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Those who are just getting acquainted with the information technology industry often lack a small but understandable, interesting and simple digression into history. Since September, I have been actively studying the IT industry . So that I myself can better understand the digital information technology, I wrote this short essay.

Over the past forty years, we have been strongly associating information technology with computers, all kinds of devices, networks, and program development. However, an application for a vacation and his trip to the desks of managers, as well as a cry “Help!” In a dark lane - all this is also information and technologies for its processing and distribution.

To a large extent, our knowledge of the past is based on miraculously surviving fragments. And even with modern technology, our knowledge is only overwhelmed by speculations about what really happened. Firstly, history was determined by the level of development of information technology. Secondly, the same information technologies were used to regularly rewrite this very story.

Revolution No. 1. Speech and writing.


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

Information is gradually accumulating in people's memory, 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 in free access. Reliability has increased. Indeed, if, for example, Grandfather Nestor died, having not had time to tell any story useful to the skills and morality of the younger generations, he could be replaced by some other grandfather at the distribution.

There were more interesting stories, buffer overflows became regular - a similar situation is still typical. Try right now to recall, for example, at least a couple of your favorite recipes. Or some really important information: what and what amounts have you spent in the last two days?

The logical consequence was the emergence of writing (approximately V millennium BC - Danube proto - script 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 - there are several writing systems that develop independently of each other.

In ancient times, writing remained the destiny 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, moreover, has owners who try to protect really important information from the curious and on this fact get profit (for example, using insider information to earn money on the stock market).

It is an interesting fact that in the development of writing, you can clearly trace the movement from hieroglyphic symbols (read: icons) to abstract letters, which individually mean nothing - a path that took several more millennia. Here we cannot but mention the hieroglyphs of Egypt (the beginning of the 4th millennium BC) and the Sumerian script (the end of the 3rd millennium BC). The writing system of the modern type, namely the Latin and Greek alphabets, was created only in the 9th-5th centuries BC. The distribution of writing was greatly facilitated by the military campaigns and conquests of that time, in particular by Alexander the Great. The technologies for storing and using books in libraries were gradually improving, becoming more similar to how we imagine the library today, the structure of processing and storage was formed,

Along 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 systematization principles, labels, directories, page numbers (read: file system) are formed. And, most importantly, we are witnessing the emergence of a special person who is exclusively involved in rewriting existing books, that is, professionally engaged in piracy (there probably was no copyright law then). About 400 BC paper was invented in China, and two hundred years after this, primitive attempts were made to replicate knowledge using prints on fabrics, and circulations, for example, of some paintings reached 400 thousand copies .

At the same time, in Europe for a long time books were reproduced exclusively by professional scribes, and we can only hope that they did their work without bias and infallibly.

Now cloud technologies allow you to store unnecessary information also on other people's computers. It used to be wrong. Previously, people alone knew very little, and, even worse, there were few such knowledgeable people. There was a very real danger of losing even those essential for survival, but small in volume of knowledge. Therefore, culture in its development instilled the habits of preserving and enhancing the collected. Libraries became the first cloud storage, then religious institutions began to perform this function.


Image taken from pinterest.com/imogo/made-you-smile

Revolution No. 2. Printing.


In the years 1452-1455 Gutenberg worked on the famous Bible. He probably didn’t even know that he used the first automated system for multiple copying information on paper. Although the circulation was only 185 copies - a colossal, seeming unattainable, result for those times. The cost of books decreased, but they were still expensive and only temples and other large institutions could purchase a book. A century later, in Russia, Ivan Fedorov published his first book “The Apostle” and the Primer (or, more precisely, it was called the alphabet “for the sake of an early infant learning”). Christianity in Europe and Russia, of course, had a decisive influence on the cultural and political environment, therefore, at the same time, the Bible was translated and published in national languages, primarily German and English.

The development of the printing industry made the publication cheaper and faster so much that it became possible to quickly and massively disseminate information - newspapers appeared. The oldest newspaper, King Pao (Capital 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 southern Germany. Since the 15th century, Frankfurt has been the center of interaction between upper and lower Germany, so by 1619 three newspapers began to regularly appear here at once, and in 1622 a publication appeared in London. In France, a little later - in 1631, but it was a full-fledged weekly publication on 4 sheets about trade, 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 “keeping abreast” ceased to be the privilege of the elite, and the massive and ever-increasing circulation of newspapers was 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 became the main way to create, store and disseminate information throughout the world, until the telegraph appeared in the 30s of the XIX century, and then Popov invented radio in 1895. But this innovation, primarily because of the technical requirements (availability of a receiver and a power supply network), took many years to gain an audience. A similar situation was with television: although the Russian scientist Rosing made the first broadcast in 1911, regular television broadcasts began only in the mid-thirties. However, now we cannot imagine life without these two familiar sources of information.

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

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