19. Computerization, everything that we know and understand today
What can be said about computerization that has not been said already? The essence of computerization from the point of view of day-to-day life is information. Information, they say, is power, and if 6 million men between 1914 and 1918 had possession of a device to educate them on the exact nature of war, that war would never have been fought. Then, of course, there is the difference between knowledge and wisdom, but that is a philosophical question, and we will not go there.
Astrolabes, such as the Antikythera Mechanism, probably represent the earliest achievements in computerization, followed by clocks and other clockwork devices. It was Charles Babbage, an innovator active in the mid-nineteenth century, who was the first to produce a programmable device that he called his ‘Difference Engine’. ‘Enigma’, the Nazi code generator that was famously cracked by British mathematicians in Bletchley Park was an early system of mechanical computerization, but it was with the advent of electronic computerization that the future was really born.
One of the first practical deployments of computerization, however, in a way that we would understand it today, was in the space industry. The great polymath Alan Turing was thinking about it after WWII, and he was one of the first to develop an algorithm, followed by storage computers and, of course, transistors.
We could go on and on, tracing a journey that ends in Silicon Valley, a journey that continues today, taking us who knows were. When the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates delivered computers to our laps, the world certainly changed, and where it will go from here, who knows?
