Ted Nelson, creator of the web pre-cursor Xanadu and author Computer Lib, has a new book out called Geeks Giving Gifts – it’s a history of computing from ancient times until now.
-27 Hierarchy (ancient beginnings)
-26 Alphabets (ancient beginnings)
-25 Punctuation (ancient beginnings)
-24 Encryption (ancient beginnings)
-23 Making Documents Hierarchical (18th Century)
-22 They All Invented Computers (hardware) (1822)
-21 They All Idealized Computers (software idealizations) (1843)
-20 Database (1880s)
-19 Voting Machines (1892)
-18 Intellectual property (1923)
-17 The Mainframe Era
-16 Computer Sound and Music (1947)
-15 Computer Graphics in Two Dimensions (1950)
-14 Computer Games, 1951
-13 Disk Drive Wars (1956)
-12 Engelbart’s NLS (1958)
-11 Xanadu (1960)
-10 Computer Graphics in Three Dimensions (1960)
-9 – The ARPANET – Getting the Message Across (1962)
-8 Instant Messaging and Texting (1960s)
-7 Computer Movies (1963)
-6 Shared Texts (1965)
-5 Email, 1965
-4 Hypertext Goes the Wrong Way (1967)
-3 Object-Oriented Programming (1967)
-2 Local Networking (1970)
-1 Datapoint– the Personal Computer with a Mainframe Mentality (1970)
0 UNIX*– Modern Computer History Begins (1970)
1 Malware and Security (1973)
2 The Era of Dinky Computers: Kits and Stunts (1974)
3 The PUI Dumbs Down the Computer (1974)
4 Paperdigm: the PUI Dumbs Down the Document (and Turns the Computer into a Paper Simulator) (1974)
5 The PUI Takes Away Our Ability To Write and Organize (1974)
6 Personal Computing (1977)
7 The World Wars (1977): Consumer Operating Systems: Microsoft Versus Apple Versus Everybody
8 Spreadsheet (1979)
9 The Domain Name System, DNS (1983)
10 Open Source (and Linux) (1983)
11 The Internet– Enjoy It While You Can (1989)
12 The Simple Early Web, 1989
13 PUI on the Internet– the Browser Salad (1992)
14 Cyberfashion (1993)
15 The URL Rejiggers Net Addresses (1994)
16 Web Biz: The Dot-Com World and the New Monopolies (1995)
17 Streaming Goes Private (1995)
18 Google (1996)
19 The World Wars Go Mobile– PDAs, Cellphones
20 Web 2.0– Walled Gardens, Cattle Pens, Collaboration Places Sort Of
Geeks Bearing Gifts Chapter Summaries
(via Robot Wisdom)
December 26, 2008 at 8:47 am
sounds like a fantastic work; only wish it was available as an e-book. In today’s age, digital distribution is everything.