[LINK] James Gleick on Information

[Tom Worthington]

Antony Barry wrote:
> On 23/05/2011, at 7:29 PM, Tom Worthington wrote:
> 
>> ... It is not inconceivable that an automatic encyclopaedic service operated through 
>> the national teleprinter or telephone service will one day exist.”
>>
>> This is attributed to "Pearcey, T.: Modern Trends in Machine 
>> Computation. Aust. J. Science X/4 Supp. (1948) in History of Computing: 
>> Learning from the Past: IFIP WG 9.7, 2010
> 
> 
> I think Vannavar Bush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanevar_Bush got there first even if he did see the recording substrate as microfilm.

Bush's "Memex" was to be a standalone electromechanical device: 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex>.

In contrast Pearcey envisioned using an electronic digital computer
linked to a national telecommunications network, to provide remote
access to a store of information. At the time he was building an
electronic digital computer, making such a speculation more credible.

The ANU library obtained a copy of Pearcey's paper for me and I made
some notes about it:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/05/modern-trends-in-machine-computation.html>.

This paper deserves to be more widely read. But only a poor quality
facsimile copy is available and then only on request after payment of a
fee to a US service. I suggest the paper should be digitised at high 
resolution and transcribed, placed online and made freely available, so 
its place in the history of computing can be properly recognised.

ps: Perhaps the Melbourne Museum should switch on CSIRAC (or an 
emulation of it) and use it as a web server: 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRAC>. ;-)


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra