Roberto Busa and the Invention of the Machine-Generated Concord
"This is a story from early in the technological revolution, when the application was out searching for the hardware, from a time before the Internet, a time before the PC, before the chip, before the mainframe. From a time even before programming itself.
Tasman's 1957 prophecy was no shot in the dark. His view of the future was a projection from his recent past. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. had assigned him in 1949 to be IBM liaison and support person for a young Jesuit's daring project to produce an index to the complete writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. First, Tasman's thesis, as subsequent history turned out, was a huge understatement; and second, it essentially defines the first large invention of Father Roberto Busa, S. J., namely, to look at 'tools developed primarily for science and commerce' and to see other uses for them. As will be seen, this was a case of fortune favoring the prepared mind. Redirecting scholarship, he essentially invented the machine-generated concordance, the first of which he had published in 1951.
Father Busa, of course, is best known as the producer of the landmark 56-volume Index Thomisticus. As he began this work in 1946, and produced a sample proof-of-concept, machine-generated concordance in 1951, his professional life spans the entire computing chapter in the history of scholarship. Emphasis in this article will be on the early steps."
(Thomas Nelson Winter, January 1999)
Published in The Classical Bulletin 75:1 (1999), pp. 3-20. Copyright © 1999 Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc.
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Computer History Museum: Selling the Computer Revolution
"The brochures selected here (just a fraction of the Museum's holdings in this area) show some of the more important technologies, companies, and applications in computing from 1948 to 1988. This covers the period from mechanical and relay-based computers to those based on the microprocessor - a remarkable transition that occurred over only 25 years. We hope you enjoy browsing through these historical documents."
(Computer History Museum)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Gender difference portrayed in vintage business equipment brochures
This collection of photos from business equipment brochures dramatically shows the extent to which our assumptions about gender roles have changed.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Powers of Ten: a dramatic representation of our place in the universe
"Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell."
(Powers of Ten © 1977 Eames Office LLC)
Fig.1 Original video of the "Powers of Ten". 1977, uploaded by EamesOffice on 26 Aug 2010, YouTube.
Fig.2 Interactive presentation of the "Powers of Ten". 2010 Based on the film by Charles and Ray Eames. An Eames Office Website.
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Video for Wikipedia: Guide to Best Practices
"This new effort takes advantage of a movement toward open video - a movement that has its roots in the free software movement that is largely powering the web today and which, through companies such as Apache, IBM, Mozilla, Oracle and Red Hat, has resulted in trillions of dollars of value creation for the stakeholders involved. The open or open-source video movement recognizes the contributions from, but also the limitations inherent in, the video work of industry leaders such as Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft. Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media and Silverlight are handsome technologies. But they have been developed and controlled by commercial companies that often protect themselves against innovations by outside coders, designers, developers, programmers - technologists, lawyers, producers, and educators keen to move away from proprietary solutions that are delivered for the benefit of shareholders first and the billions of everyday people who connect via the web a pale second.
The open video movement recognizes the importance of rights and licensing strategies designed to create profit or serve national interests, but it is critical of systems that prohibit access to film and sound assets becoming part of our collective audiovisual canon. Many film and sound resources digitized for preservation, for example, do not appear online because of dated copyright rules; and some of the great investments (millions of dollars in fact) by, for example, the U.K. government in film and sound resource digitization result in materials being put online only behind educational and national paywalls that keep students in Nairobi and Nashville from using London-based resources in their work.
Enabling video to catch up to the open-source movement on the web goes to the heart of our efforts to improve our understanding of the world. The central technologies of the web - HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP - are open for all to build upon and improve, and video’s future should be similarly unobstructed."
(Peter B. Kaufman, 2010)
Fig.1 Kid Kameleon, CC BY SA NC
2). Video for Wikipedia and the Open Web October 2010 An Intelligent Television White Paper PETER B. KAUFMAN INTELLIGENT TELEVISION WWW.INTELLIGENTTELEVISION.COM THE OPEN VIDEO ALLIANCE Version 1.0
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