The Computer as a Communication Device
60’s envisioning of computer as a communication device. fun illustrations. https://twitter.com/deaneckles/status/1308110209064275970
Excerpts
In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. … That is a rather startling to say, but it is our conclusion.
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we could have been throusands of miles apart and communicated just as effectively-as people-over the distance.
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But to communicate is more than to send and receive. Do two tape recorders communicate when they play to each other and record from each other?
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Creative, interactive communication requires a plastic or moldable medium that can be modeled, a dynamic medium in which premises will flow into consequences, and above all a common medium that can be contributed to and experimented with by all.
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The switching function is important but it is not the one we have in mind when we say that the computer can revolutionize communication. We are stressing the modeling function, not the switching function.
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For each node there is a small, general-purpose computer which we shall call a “message processor”.
A nice illustration of “network” with caption “All nodes can be interconnected via their message processors”.
It describes Internet pretty nicely with the need for a common protocol that can carry both control signal and data.
They will be communities not of common location, but of commont interest.
They predicted the emergence of online communities.
You will seldom make a telephone call; you will ask the network to link your consoles together. You will seldom make a purely business trip, because linking consoles will be so much more efficient. When you do visit another person with the object of intellectual communication, you can he will sit as a two-place console and interact as much through it as face to face.
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First, life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.
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For the society, the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly on the question: Will “to be on line” be a privilege or a right? … Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever, for consider the magnitude of the task of adapting the network’s software to all the new generations of computer, coming closer and closer upon the heels of their predecessors until the entire population of the world is caught up in an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging.