The application holy war started on 7 November 2000 with a relatively innocuous question about implementing the new technology of content management: http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/archives/0011/techwhirl-0011-00454.html and can be followed forward in time using the [Thread Next] links before spawning several more threads. It then jumps to a new thread at http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/archives/0011/techwhirl-0011-00606.html. Further threads can be followed sequentially by using your browser to search the thread index http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/archives/0011/index.html for the string "real value". The war heated up further when I joined the argument http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/archives/0011/techwhirl-0011-00772.html. The issue of the value of the new technology was where most heat was generated. The list owner eventually banned some of the participants when the debate became too personal and vitriolic.

Many of Bach's fugues are available via the Web to experience via your browser as MIDI scores for realisation on your own computer Bach's little fugue is my all-time favourite: http://www..texaschapbookpress.com/bachlittlefugue.htm. A fairly extensive sampling of Bach's music is available for "on screen" listening on http://www.bachcentral.com/midiindexcomplete.html. ABC Classic FM offers a 55 minute Beginners Guide to the Fugue by Graham Abbott, an Australian conductor and teacher of some note. [Supply link: see http://www.abc.net.au/classic/keys/stories/s1315328.htm

Word processors, most desk top publishing applications, HTML editors, etc.

Also including SGML/XML editors such as ArborText’s Epic Editor and SoftQuad’s XMetaL.

My thanks to Briar Press’s web pages (http://www.bestweb.net/~bpress/res.html) and the Melbourne Museum of Printing's Glossary of Printing and Typography (http://home.vicnet.net.au/~typo/glossary/glossary.htm) for help in recovering an arcane and totally forgotten vocabulary related to an essentially extinct technology.  See http://www.sinovelo.de/working.htm for a movie clip of the type of press I learned on. Some of the elements of typesetting are discussed on Graphion's Type Museum pages - http://www.graphion.com/museum.tpl?font=%5Bfont%5D; see especially - http://www.graphion.com/oldtype.tpl?font=[font] for a discussion of the impact of technological change on 20th Century typesetting.
 
 

Return

For an extraordinary extracurricular project, Occidental College's calculus instructor (I have lost his name in the mists of time) made arrangements for a group of his students (including myself) to use CalTech's Burroughs (it may have been the 201 model) machine to develop a program able to symbolically differentiate mathematical equations. This seems to be a low-end version of the Burroughs 204-205 range - a first generation commercial computer, first implemented in 1954 - http://members..iinet.net.au/~dgreen/timeline.html, only three years after the very first commercial computers were produced in 1951. Programming was in machine language, but the project introduced the ideas of analysis, flow-charting and design. The Burroughs 204-205 line is documented by http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-b.html - BURROUGHS-204 in Weik, M.H. (1961a);  University of Virginia Department of Computer Science Museum: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/museum.html. Programming in this environment is described by Joel Rose - http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/B205/JoelRose.html
Having succeeded with differentiation, our next step was to see if we could develop programs to help infer integral equations. This was well beyond the capacity of the Burroughs machine, so arrangements were made for us to submit jobs using decks of punch cards to UCLA's new IBM 709 computer - one of the earlier commercial machines to use magnetic core memory. This latter exercise also introduced us to the FORTRAN compiled language, developed from 1954-58 (http://iecc.com/comparch/article/97-10-008). See Paul Pierce's Computer Collection page for some background on the 709: http://www.piercefuller.com/collect/main.html; see also http://www..ecs.csun.edu/~dxs/history/histcomp.html - a1. 

In early 1981, this was a Z80 based prototype, mounted on a trolley for portability, having 64 K memory and two 80 K 8” floppy diskettes for programs and storage, running the CP/M operating system with WordStar. Byte Magazine (Sept. 1995) listed both in the top three of their choices as the most influential software products for personal computing - http://www.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art5.htm. Sawyer, R.J. (1990, 1996). - http://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm - explains why the pre-Windows WordStar is still a better authoring environment than any of today's page layout oriented word processing systems such as MS Word. See Les Bell's CP/M and Derivatives for a more complete history - http://www.lesbell.com.au/Home.nsf/e13d28c7fa3133464a2569250040c56b/3ae024cd3341f0754a256925004333b7?OpenDocument

The SIM system (Hall 2001), currently marketed under the name TeraText developed in Melbourne, Australia, by RMIT University (which has recently spun off the development organisation as InQuirion).

Harvey and Pagel (1991); See http://www..santafe.edu/~shalizi/reviews/harvey-pagel/ for an extended summary of the comparative method. I had implicitly absorbed the methodology from my coursework in comparative vertebrate anatomy and comparative animal psychology (ethology).

This was notwithstanding the fact that my research was performed at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. (I prepared most of the 20,000 lizard chromosome slides referred to on the Web site for my thesis research.).

Sheppard (1999). - http://www.kfki.hu/chemonet/polanyi/9912/sheppard2.html, Section 3.1.2) provides a summary of the Hypothetico Deductive Method.
 

When researching the 1983 paper, I was unable to find any sources actually analysing the comparative methodology or its epistemic value.
 

Popper, K.R., (1959, 1963, 1972); See also: Routledge's Karl Popper pages - http://www.routledge.com/popper/default.html for Poppers works and works about Popper;  R.S. Percival's The Karl Popper Web - http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/ for a general review of Popper’s importance in developing the theory of knowledge and the Rathouse Philosophy Forum http://www.the-rathouse.com/forum.html for many of the papers delivered at the Karl Popper Centenary Conference - http://www.univie.ac.at/karlpopper2002/; and Rafe Champion's own articles on Popper and related philosophers on http://www.the-rathouse.com/writingsonpopper.html.

Heylighen, F. (1993). in Principia Cybernetica Web. This site and its links provide a comprehensive review of various theories of epistemology.
 

An extract describing the problem of induction from one of Popper’s editions can be found at - http://dieoff.com/page126.htm; the introduction to Diettrich (2000), provides an update review of the problem of induction, and many references to the primary literature. See also - http://www.google.com/search?q=%22problem+of+induction%22.
 

As will be discussed in Episode 4 of this work, this is an oversimplified view, which Popper substantially modified and elaborated in later works (e.g., Objective Knowledge - Popper 1972). See also Thornton (2000) The Problem of Demarcation in Karl Popper –  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/ - Dema; The Karl Popper Web - http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/intro_reading/Introductory_Reading.html - Realism and the Aim of Science; and try Google - http://www.google.com/search?q=%22problem+of+demarcation%22. Add discussion of David Stove's Anything Goes. 

Stove, D. (1982). Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists. Pergamon. - Full text: http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Facility/4118/dcs/popper/popper.html. Reprinted as (1988). Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism. Macleay Press: Sydney, including new forward by Keith Windschuttle - http://www.newcriterion.com/constant/stove1.htm

Champion, R. (2003). Rafe Champion's Critique - Anything Goes: Origins of Scientific Rationalism, David Stove. The Rathouse - The Philosophy Site of Rafe Champion - http://www.the-rathouse.com/AnythingGoes.html

At least from my point of view as an evolutionary biologist, Popper’s epistemology as presented in this book is appropriately applied to establishing evolutionary biology as a science, but his book is flawed by his evident lack of understanding of biological evolution or evolutionary sciences. Episode 4 will provide a deep analysis of how Popper's evolutionary theory of knowledge actually applies fundamentally to evolutionary phenomena. I was startled by the conclusions I reached in this analysis when I only recently came to understand fully what was saying. However, discussion of Popper's evolutionary theory of knowledge requires development of a vocabulary and worldview that cannot readily be provided at this early stage in exploring the theory of knowledge.
 

Popper and Kuhn published their seminal works in the middle of the 20th Century. These provided substantial fodder for many subsequent authors. However, from my point of view as a once practising scientist who had a real-world need to understand the core issues, I have yet to find sources who significantly improve on Popper's and Kuhn's original ideas. Many writers who discuss both Popper and Kuhn in the same work don’t appear to understand that the two followed what I believe were incommensurably different paradigms. One was an epistemologist, the other one was working primarily as an historian. Kuhn's last words on the subjects are to be found in the posthumously published book, The Road Since Structure (Kuhn 2000), which also includes his philosophical autobiography (Baltas et al. 2000)
 

According to at least one critic (Masterman 1970, with whom I agree in this case), Kuhn is an unreliable witness even regarding his own ideas. Even in Structure, Kuhn used the term "paradigm" with more 20 identifiably different meanings. Nevertheless, the term is a useful label for the concept described here. In later works, he emphasised that he intended to use the term in its meaning as a "disciplinary matrix".
 

The kinds of technological and conceptual "revolutions" discussed in this document do not necessarily involve the replacement of one paradigm by another. As used here, the basic concept of a revolutionary change or revolutionary difference is that distinct groups of people hold onto incommensurable paradigms, and thus deal with their subject matters in substantially different ways that may (and often do) lead to communication problems between the groups holding different paradigms.
 

Chaotic evolutionary changes associated with threshold crossings may often be an underlying factor contributing to the evolutionary phenomenon that Eldridge and Gould (1972) referred to as “punctuated equilibrium”. Prothero (1992) reviews the concept and gives some examples. Gould (2002) is definitive. However, having personally spent more than 10 years studying the population cytogenetics of a lizard radiation encompassing more than 150 species, where some lineages appear to exhibit what many would term punctuated equilibria, I do not uncritically accept much that has been written about the sources of the phenomenon. I also note that because well preserved fossils are so rare, changes in the fossil record of a lineage may appear to be "punctuated", that in reality may actually have taken place gradually over hundreds or thousands of generations from one benchmark fossil to the next. Although this is an instant of geological time, it may still a gradual process in evolutionary time, as Gould (2002) reminds the critics of punctuated equilibria and Darwinian evolutionary theory.
 

Rieger, et. al., (1976) define grade as “a unit of biological improvement from an evolutionary point of view comprising a group of individuals similar in their level of organization.” after Huxley (1958). A "grade shift" corresponds to a significant change in the structure or organization of the group or species not relating to simple changes directly related to things like size of the organism. In the context I use the term, a grade shift represents changes sufficient to allow the species to exploit a new way of making a living.
 

I tried to introduce this picture in 1991 in a computer literacy training package I was developing for corporate executives and managers, in hopes that it would help them to comprehend why they needed to understand the new capabilities and rates of changes involved in managing computer technology in the organizational workplace. The course development was cancelled when it was decided that management already knew everything the needed to about the technology. In part the present work grew out of the frustration generated by this kind of attitude.
 

E.g., see http://hist-met.org/hmsar1.shtml and http://www..jiscmail.ac.uk/files/ARCH-METALS/bib01.htm for many references to the origins of metallurgy.
 

E.g., see http://www.technology.niagarac.on.ca/courses/tech238g/newcomen.htm.. Arguably the hand-operated European printing press, invented around 1450, was the first industrial technology. However, the huge cognitive impact of this particular industrial invention is the theme of another major subtheme in my Subject, to be elaborated below.
 

E.g., see http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1823cotton.html.
 

I make no claim to have invented the term, "microelectronics revolution", but I am intrigued by the fact that as at 8 March 2001, Google returned only about 660 hits on this term compared to more than 212,000 hits on the term "industrial revolution". More common names for the microelectronics phenomenon are "information revolution", which yielded more than 101,000 hits, "internet revolution", yielding about 63,000 hits, and "computer revolution", with 36,400 hits. (Note: click the "hits" links to see today's count.) However, the latter terms mingle and confuse issues relating to the revolution in technology measured by Moore's Law (see below), together with the cognitive revolution in how humans manage knowledge enabled by the technology. I am further intrigued by the fact that the industrial revolution is still more recognised as a phenomenon deserving a distinctive name than is the currently pervasive phenomenon named by the microelectronics revolution and its near synonyms.
 

"Timeline" accessed via http://computertech.server101.com/index.html?main.htm&2.
 

http://www.veranda..com.ph/hermant/history.htm; http://www.asis.org/Features/Pioneers/billings.htm; O’Connor and Robertson (1999). An abacus helps a human compute. The calculating machine does the computation for the human.
 

http://www.research.att.com/history/39comp.html; see also http://hoc.co.umist.ac.uk/storylines/compdev/ for a comprehensive history of the development of computing.
 

http://www.ebnonline.com/digest/story/OEG20000505S0063
 

These are obvious cognitive revolutions in human history (e.g., Harnad 1991).  Harnad and I both agree that the "Fourth Revolution" is a knowledge-based revolution being enabled by microelectronics, but - probably given our different time horizons in the revolution - we differ on what its key features are/will be from the cognitive point of view. Robertson (1998) identifies the same revolutions as being crucial "categories of civilization", and measures their cognitive impact in terms of the increased number of bits of information that could be controlled by a single human.
 

Nissen (1993). See also: http://early-cuneiform.humnet.ucla.edu/; Eby (????), Lo (2000) - Cuneiform  http://www.ancientscripts.com/cuneiform.html; Heise (1996?) Chapter 4 - Cuneiform Writing Systems - http://saturn.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/cuneiform.html
 

Orientals used moveable ideographic type at least 300 years earlier, but there is little evidence that this greatly influenced the evolution of their cultures, e.g., see Chartier, R. (1996). For information and links on early typesetting in the European context see Graphion's Typesetting Museum - http://www.graphion.com/museum.tpl?font=%5Bfont%5D
 

Clement (1997a); Rubenstein (1994-1999); see also Guild Hall: Gutenberg Notes: http://web.archive.org/web/20010828124720/http://renaissance.district96.k12.il.us/guildhall/printer/gutenbergnotes.html; Gutenberg Digital - http://www.gutenbergdigital.de/gudi/start.htm

Douglas Robertson (1998), in his book, The New Renaissance: Computers and the Next Level of Civilization, argues that the major impacts of the four revolutions were due to the orders of magnitude increases in the number of bits of information that individuals and society could manage as summarized above. David Staley's (1999) comparative review of three books, including Robertson's, addressing the revolutionary impacts of computer technology on the nature of humanity, summarizes Robertson's thesis. As I will show in the Counter Subject and elaborate more below, qualitative changes in the kinds of information that can be managed cognitively are probably much more important than the very real quantitative changes Robertson highlights.
 

Until recent changes in the Computer Sciences course outlines, The Australian Army Information Management Manual, Version 2, was publicly available via the Australian Defence Forces Academy web server.
 

Fjällbrant (1998) in Data, Information and Knowledge. Chapter2. - http://internet.unib.ktu.lt/physics/TEXTS/communication/chap2.htm, presents similar rankings of data, information and knowledge. When I searched Google during 03/2001 while working on an early draft of this work for "data, information, knowledge" and "data, information and knowledge", nearly 300 hits were recorded (e.g., http://www.ime.usp.br/~vwsetzer/data-info.html, http://www.inforum.cz/inforum99/prednasky/vogt-datainfo.htm, http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~darius/arc_know/arc_know.html, so the idea of ranking these three terms - and sometimes the fourth and/or fifth terms - intelligence and wisdom (sometimes listed in reverse order under the acronym WIKID) - is reasonably widespread in the knowledge management community. When the same search was performed on 7/03/2003 6480 hits were recorded! However, Coombe extended the ranking further. I have found one work (Sheridan 1991-2003) considering these terms (except that he replaces information with "indicators") along a value dimension, that also considers their relationships to power.
 

T. S. Eliot's The Rock - Peter Kaminski (2001) quotes and explains the context of the following passage:

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,

The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

Following another lead in Kaminski's InformationKnowledgeWisdom I found the philosophical quote from Frank Zappa's (1979) largely obscene song, Packard Goose:

Information is not knowledge

Knowledge is not wisdom
Wisdom is not truth
Truth is not beauty
Beauty is not love
Love is not music
Music is the BEST...

Full X-rated lyrics  to Packard Goose are available on: http://www.sing365.com/music/Lyric.nsf/songUnid/91146C8A0437AEF648256972000E3476. However Zappa's context is not inappropriate to the story being told here. The MIDI score can be found for realization on your computer on http://www.philcremer.com/zappa/midi/goose.mid. Compare with http://www..texaschapbookpress.com/bachlittlefugue.htm, or http://www.bachcentral.com/ORGAN/toccata2.mid.
 

Dempsey (1996); Heylighen (1995); Christianini (1997); Spinney. (1997); Christensen & Hooker (1998); Bradie & Harms (2001); Vehkavaara (1998). For further readings in evolutionary epistemology see Konrad Lorenz Theory Lab - Evolutionary Epistemology: http://www.kli.ac.at/theorylab/Areas/EE.html. For definitions of knowledge not specifically grounded in evolutionary epistemology see also Fumerton (2000); Dykes (1996).
 

(US) DOD Dictionary of Military Terms - http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/.
 

Merriam-Webster  (2000) - http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=sense.
 

See also (US) DOD Dictionary of Military Terms definitions for strategic advantage, strategic concept, strategic estimate, strategic intelligence, strategic plan, and strategic vulnerability
 

i.e., try http://www.onelook.com/?w=Power&ls=a for "power". Also power and hegemony, in Belton (1996-2000).
 

This meaning may bear some resemblance to Michel Foucault's concept of power; e.g., see Patton (1994), Al Amoudi (1998?)
 

See Dooley, K. (1996). There is a substantial literature on adaptation in complex systems: http://www.brint.com/Systems.htm - COMPknow is a good place to start. Scroll up and down for 'real world' applications.
 

I first studied Popper's Objective Knowledge (1972) more than 25 years ago as reported in Hall (1983). Then, in my intellectual arrogance because his understanding of the practice of the science of biology seemed so poor, I completely failed to understand the significance of his three worlds to the biological sciences. Now, after I have studied Maturana and Varela's (1980) concept of autopoiesis, and have begun applying biological principles to organizational knowledge management, I now understand that Popper was explaining in clear and simple prose that biology in its own right is epistemology or that epistemology is biology. In this area, the scope and depth of Popper's insights about the evolutionary origins of knowledge have barely been realized.
 

Under the topic "hierarchical theory of selection" Gould (2002) in his Structure of Evolutionary Theory explains in great detail that natural selection filters hereditary knowledge at many different levels of biological organization and presents a number of arguments as to how this understanding modifies some of the peripheral understandings of the Darwinian theory of natural selection and descent with modification. I accept Gould's arguments, but prefer my own formulation as to what these levels are and how they are defined. From my own point of view as an evolutionary biologist I see organismic natural selection operating on "individuals" at any of the levels of organization corresponding to 

• single genes (i.e., some single gene mutations are "lethal" in that they absolutely prevent survival of their carriers to reproduction in any combination of other genes), 
• physical chromosomes as they are assorted in the divisions of cells in mitosis and meiosis,
• genic interactions involved in coherent developmental pathways (i.e., some combinations of genes may be detrimental to survival and reproduction even though the individual genes perform adequately in other combinations),
• gametes as they compete to form zygotes (i.e., the expression of genes prior to the formation of a fertile egg or seed is lethal to the gamete or impairs its ability to fertilize or be fertilized),
• zygotes/individual organisms as they compete to begin an independent existence from their parents or as they compete as independent individuals to survive and pass their heredity to the subsequent generation
• demes or local populations of interbreeding individuals as they exist for many or fewer generations of limited genetic exchange with other populations, 
• species - the entire population of individuals sharing a common heredity and still potentially capable of interbreeding to form subsequent generations in competition with other species to survive through time, and
• clades - (groups of species sharing a common heredity) in competition with other clades to survive through time.

1. the specific item of genetic knowledge must control the development of some form of phenotypic trait (i.e., something that is exposed as a real World 1 product) and 
2. that the survival value of that trait in World 1 depends to some degree on the genetic knowledge.

In other words the heritable knowledge passed to subsequent generations is filtered (to the extent that there is some degree of causal relationship between specific knowledge and the expressed phenotype) at many levels, such that knowledge that does not have survival value is not propagated. In each generation a low frequency of random mutation adds variation to the knowledge available to the population of individuals (at whatever level of organization), which is then subject to selection. Knowledge that doesn't work well or at all is selectively removed, such that that which survives is a produc product selectively shaped by its World 1 values.
 

A number of papers and presentations on John Boyd's strategic thinking as this applies to military affairs and commerce can be accessed through the Belisarius.Com site: Kettle Creek (1998-2000). War, Chaos and Business - http://www.belisarius.com/default.htm and Defense and the National Interest - http://d-n-i.net/second_level/boyd_military.htm. See also Joshi (1999); Osborne et. al (1996); MoD (1999) - http://www.raf.mod.uk/airpower/doctrine/ap3000/book/04.pdf; Patajo (1999); Farrell (2002) as examples of the widespread use of OODA loop concept.
 

Boyd's concept of the OODA loop has been adopted in a number of disciplines. An indication of the richness of the concept is given by the number of references found via Google - http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ooda+loop%22&btnG=Google+Search
 

http://anthro.palomar.edu/synthetic/synth_7.htm in O'Neil 2002,  provides an adequate conventional explanation of adaptation by natural selection for those non-biologists who wish to attempt such a mapping. The Google search term: ["natural selection" adaptation evolution] provides access to a good selection of university course notes on evolutionary adaptation, without too many op ed creationist sites. Stephen Jay Gould's (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, though excruciatingly verbose, is a masterful exposition of the roles of natural selection, chance and prior history in organismic evolution.
 

Boyd's personal library and files (see http://www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/boyd/boyd_papers.htm) included three copies of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (one of them annotated), as well as Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Conjectures and Refutations. Boyd also specifically used the term paradigm in several of his presentations.
 

The belisarius.com site includes links to papers extending Boyd's insights into the development of military and commercial strategies.
 

See especially US Marine Corps Doctrine Publication 6. Chapter 2, Command and Control Theory in, Command and Control - http://www.maxwell.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/mcdp6/ch2.htm:

This doctrinal publication describes a theory and philosophy of command and control for the U.S. Marine Corps. Put very simply, the intent is to describe how we can reach effective military decisions and implement effective military actions faster than an adversary in any conflict setting on any scale. In so doing, this publication provides a framework for all Marines for the development and exercise of effective command and control in peace, in crisis, or in war. This publication represents a firm commitment by the Marine Corps to a bold, even fundamental shift in the way we will view and deal with the dynamic challenges of command and control in the information age. ... C. C. KRULAK, General, U.S. Marine Corps, Commandant of the Marine Corps [http://www.maxwell.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/mcdp6/fwd.htm]

Toffler, A., and Toffler, H. (1993), War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Boston: Little, Brown, p. 32. [citation from the original]
 

Cooper (1994), p. 21. [citation from the original]
 

Andrew F. Krepinevich, “Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions,” The National Interest, No. 37, Fall 1994, p. 30. [citation from the original]. Galdi's (1995)  Section 3 summarises Krepinevich's lists of revolutions.
 

Krepinevich, “Cavalry to Computer,” p. 30; Cooper (1994), p. 1; in addition, each of the Department of Defense-sponsored service roundtables on the RMA were organized around these four elements. (See The U.S. Army Roundtable on the Revolution in Military Affairs, McLean, VA: Science Applications International Corporation, October 1993; The U.S. Air Force Roundtable on the Revolution in Military Affairs; The U.S. Navy Roundtable on the Revolution in Military Affairs; The Summary Roundtable on the Revolution in Military Affairs.) [citation from the original]
 

For those who wish to see the complexity of the Mandelbrot and other fractal generators, the "freeware" application Fractint can be downloaded from http://spanky.fractint.org/www/fractint/fractint.html. Fractint has given me many hours of amazement and pleasure as I have explored the infinitely complex virtual landscapes inherent in the World Three artifacts of the Mandelbrot and other fractal generators included in this free application. The simple mathematical sources of these virtual landscapes is described by Elert (1995-2000).
 

See http://www.cut-the-knot.com/blue/chaos.html for a simple mathematical explanation and some live demonstrations of the emergence of chaos.
 

Eldridge and Gould (1972) defined the concept of punctuated equilibria. Prothero (1992) provides many examples and reviews how well the idea has stood the test of time. Gould (2002) provides a comprehensive explanation of the non-linear aspects of evolution.
 

2025 Final Report, Air University - http://www.maxwell.af.mil/au/2025/ [http://web.archive.org/web/20011217194727/www.maxwell.af.mil/au/2025/]
 

Jensen (2001) provides a fairly detailed summary of Eisenstein's arguments.
 

The codex (manuscript or printed sheets stitched together on the edge to form what we now call a book) - Clement (1997); http://www.slais.ubc.ca/people/students/student-projects/M_Chesko/L513/definitions.htm; http://www.umilta.net/folio.html.
 

Hobart and Schiffman (1998) make the point that the illumination and rich visual design of manuscripts and codices were provided primarily as aids to memory for people whose primary mode of transmitting knowledge was by speech from memory. Richly illuminated documents were not designed to help a new reader to discover its contents, but rather to retain in memory what was read from the document. By today's standards of mass produced paperbacks, manuscripts and codexes were incomprehensibly expensive. Far better to help the reader file and retain the contents in memory than to rely on having the priceless artifact at hand when the recorded knowledge was needed.
 

Griscom (1998) - http://www.victorianweb.org/cpace/infotech/asg/ag11.html

A chronology of highlights in the historical development of book technology is provided by Knops, C. (2000). Time-table (Chronological). in Book Information Website - http://www.xs4all.nl/~knops/timetab.html. See also Knops Boekrestauratie - Conservation and Restoration of Books and Paper for information on the construction and restoration of early books. Sean Gabb http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc108.htm provides a personal account on the joys of bookbinding.
 

The Jacquard Loom. - http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/jacquard.html in da Cruz, F. (2001); Punch Card Loom - http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/technology/jacquard.html; Connections Episode 4 Supplement: Punched Cards and Computers - http://www.technology.niagarac.on.ca/courses/tech238g/conne4.htm; http://www.newbegin.com/itemmis_18.html
 

The Hollerith Tabulating Machine - http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/hollerith.html in da Cruz, F. (2001).
 

Several values have been given, but most seem to agree that the introduction of the tabulating machines reduced the overall labour requirement approximately by an order of magnitude by comparison to the previous census.

IBM's corporate history begins with IBM Through the Years: Pre 1890 - http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/decade_1890.html

See The Museum of HP Calculators: How Calculating Machines Work - http://www.hpmuseum.org/mechwork.htm#monroe. The model illustrated on this Web page was cranked by hand, but I presume the ones driven by an electrical motor worked the same way. The electrically driven machines were fun to use, making a whirring clatter as they summed a column, a thunk with each shift, and a very satisfying kerwhunkity clatter clatter as they completed a multiplication or long division. In many ways these were the culmination of Babbidges invention. The University of Amsterdam Computer Museum has a manual for the kind of calculator I used -  http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/monroe8N.pdf
 

The University of Amsterdam Computer Museum describes the paper tape technology - http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/papertape.html. In the early 1960's my wife was one of Australia's first "word processor" operators, where she used a Friden JustoWriter (which stored correctable texts on paper tape) to produce justified camera ready copy for some of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation's journals - http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/flexowriter_fs.html. See also: http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/friden/ and Eisenberg (1992).
 

The IBM 285. - http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/tabulator.html, The IBM 407 Accounting Machine.- http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/407.html and Interconnected Punched Card Equipment - http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/switch.html all in da Cruz, F. (2001) trace the evolution of punch card tabulating and calculating technology up through 1950.
 

The Hollerith Tabulating Machine. - http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/hollerith.htmlin da Cruz, F. (2001); Hollerith's Punched Cards - http://www.maxmon.com/punch1.htmin Maxfield and Montrose (1998); Punched Card History. - http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/history.htmlin Jones (????)
 

Lubar (1992); The IBM 407 Accounting Machine.- http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/407.htmlin da Cruz, F. (2001)
 

Weik, M.H. (1961); Winegrad and Akera (1996); The proceedings of the International Conference on the History of Computing, 14-16 August 1998 at Paderborn, Germany published a number of papers on the people and technologies involved in the first electronic computers - http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~widiger/ICHC/Schedule.html [http://web.archive.org/web/20011026230815/http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~widiger/ICHC/Schedule.html] See also Copeland 2000 for a history of early computing.
 

The EDVAC Design - http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/mauchly/jwm9.htmlin Goldschmidt and Akera (2000); 1944 AD to 1952 AD: The First Stored Program Computer -- EDVAC - http://www.maxmon.com/1946ad.htmin Maxfield and Montrose (1998); Riley (1987); Zaft (1997); History - Hardware - http://www.artsci..wustl.edu/~bblank/C-1-1.htmlin Blank (1999)
 

Muuss (????) provides a cornucopia of old documents on the US Army's involvement in developing the first generations of computer technology. See especially Kempf, K. (1961).
 

UNIVAC - http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL-t-z.html - UNIVAC in Weik (1955); UNIVAC I - http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-u3.html - UNIVAC-I in Weik (1961a)
 

UNIVAC - http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL-t-z.html - UNIVAC in Weik (1955). By comparison to the UNIVAC I, PC I am writing this document on in January 2002 (uses a Pentium 4 chip) adds a 64 bit word length at 3,500,000,000 MHz (360,014 times faster); 127 MB memory (10,583 times greater capacity) and 28 GB disk storage - not counting 2 CD R/W drives (2,000 times greater than provided by 10 tape drives). While I am writing this text on my computer, I have open a number of Web pages, and I am also playing through a list of Scarlatti  harpsichord sonatas (e.g., http://www.geocities.com/Paris/3486/scad_159.mid) on the integral synthesizer.

The "raw power" of a computer can be measured by the amount of memory ´ the clock speed ´ the word length. Given that the UNIAC's words are processed as decimal digits, the Pentium is actually able to add larger numbers in a single cycle. However, in this calculation I assume both machines process the same length of word. By this measure, my personal computer is 3.8 x 10⁹ times more powerful than UNIVAC I, the first fully commercial electronic computer. An approximately equivalent computer can be purchased today from Dell for under $950.00 (0.001 ´ the cost of the UNIVAC - which is probably closer to 0.0001 when inflation is taken into consideration). The raw power per dollar ((speed ´ memory)/cost) on my desktop is approximately 3.8 x 10¹³ times that of the UNIVAC I. These numbers do not take into consideration the much higher sophistication of today's processors and software by comparison to the first ones, which would probably equate to another order of magnitude in power.
 

The Ferranti Mark 1 - http://www.computer50.org/mark1/FM1.html in Napper (1998).
 

The Napper (1998) pages on Manchester University's celebration of 50 years of computer technology are a cornucopia of information on the origins and early developments of digital computer technology. More details on the early British computer industry can be found in Lavington (1980)

Alan M. Turing (1912 - 1954) - http://www.computer50.org/mark1/turing.html in Napper (1998). For more information on Turing's impact on mathematics and philosophy see: Hodges, A. (2001); O'Connor and Robertson (1999a); Copeland (1997).
 

Computer Generations - http://www..columbia.edu/acis/history/generations.html in da Cruz. (2001); Polad et. al (????). Both works have excellent photographs and summary explanations of the early technologies to give some idea of their massive physical scales by comparison to today's desk-top and lap-top machines.
 

http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1952.html; http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_intro.html
 

The IBM 701 - http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/grosch.html in da Cruz. (2001); http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell/Computer_Structures__Readings_and_Examples/00000535.htm; IBM-701 Electronic Data Processing System - http://www..ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL-i.html - IBM-701 - in Weik (1955); International Business Machines and the IBM 701 EDPM - http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa070798.htm in Bellis (????).
 

http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/CoreMemory.html; Core Memory - http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/core.html - 2361 in da Cruz (2001); Redin (2000); Beebe. (1994)
 

http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1954.html
 

http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1955.html
 

http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/decade_1950.html.
 

Section III - Analysis and Trends in Weik (1955) summarises user experience including facilities, maintenance and operating labour resource requirements for all of the first generation computers used in the US - http://www.ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL-III-A.html
 

Third Generation - http://www..ecs.csun.edu/~dxs/history/histcomp.html - a3 in Polad et al (????)
 

http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1964.html
 

Moore's Law - http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm; Moore (1965); Gilheany (2000?); Parker et. al (1989).
 

Intel Processor Hall of Fame - http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/exhibit/hist_micro/hof/hof_main.htm in Intel Museum - http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/
 

Typewriters using paper tape as a storage medium had already been in use for more than a decade (see note)
 

Illustration from http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/exhibit/hist_micro/hof/4004B.htm in Intel Museum - http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/
 

Illustration from http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/exhibit/hist_micro/hof/8008.htm in Intel Museum - http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/
 

Rostky, (1998); Magnetic Disk Heritage Center - http://www.iist.scu.edu/iist/MDHC/history1.htm; A history of firsts from the leader in data storage; http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/firsts/timeline.htm; Storage Devices - http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/storage.html in Lessard (2002); Hunt, J. (????); Disktrend: Of Special Interest - http://www.disktrend.com/dtspecal.htm for links relating to the historical development of (initially) magnetic storage technologies. Anon (????) Hard Disk Drives - http://www.lintech.org/comp-per/07MAGREC.pdf.
 

Disk/Trend - Five decades of disk drive industry firsts - http://www.disktrend.com/5decades2.htm
 

IBM 1440 Data Processing System. in Weik (1964) -  http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL64-i.html.

See also: http://www.classiccmp.org/mail-archive/classiccmp/1998-12/0531.html for evidence that Altair really wasn't the first.

Illustration from http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/exhibit/hist_micro/hof/pent4.htm in Intel Museum - http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/.

http://www.u-bourgogne.fr/CRI-CCUB/doc/fortran/ch1-1.html in Anon (????); HPCWire (2001); http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/fortran/fortran.html

The first generation language is the binary object code directly understandable by the computer's processor. A second generation language is the assembler language for a particular processor, where there is a 1:1 relationship between mnemonics (i.e., an abbreviation for the name of the command) which make some sense to a human and the binary codes used by the computer. A third generation language is a generic symbolic programming language such as FORTRAN or COBOL where the commands can be written in words and symbols without knowing the assembler language for a particular computer. Third generation languages are converted into computer-specific assembler language or object code by compiler programs written for each type of computer or assembler language. The concept of fourth generation languages (or high level languages) is used for macros and similar types of languages associated with word processing and database systems. Visual Basic, which MicroSoft has standardised across its later Windows applications, is actually a third generation language. In the case of the Excel product, Visual Basic replaced a more powerful macro language used in earlier Excel releases.

See also http://web.archive.org/web/19970208113042/http://library.microsoft.com/msinfo/mshist/1975.htm

http://www.parc.xerox.com/history.html provides Xerox's corporate view on what PARC invented.

Despite the fact that WordStar is commercially extinct, it still has active user groups prepared to fight holy wars over their preferences for the product, e.g., http://www.petrie.u-net.com/. The History page on this site offers interesting insights (Petrie 1999). The science fiction writer, R.J. Sawyer (1990) explains in near epistemological terms why he believes that the early WordStar was the best word processing tool ever developed for capturing knowledge as text.

Power, D.J. (2000); Tanner, D. (1999); see also J. Walk and Associate's Spreadsheet History links - http://www.j-walk.com/ss/history/index.htm.

Terms in this section requiring additional definition or discussion are hot-linked to the FOLDOC Free On Line Dictionary of Computing copyright by Denis Howe - http://www.foldoc.org/foldoc/index.html.

Hutchings (1996); Committee on Innovations in Computing and Communications (1999) - Chapter 6 - The rise of relational databases - http://www.nap..edu/readingroom/books/far/ch6.html; Silberschartz (1991); CERN (2000).

All of humanity working from the beginning of time would not be able to test all permutations and combinations of these features. It is inevitable that users will try sequences and combinations of functions that have never been tested together. It is also inevitable that some of these combinations will cause the system to fail. Coffee (2000) notes that at least 63,000! bugs in Windows 2000 have actually been documented. See also (Hyde 1999). The situation with MS Word is no better. Working with a nearly blank document in MS Word 97, in a four hour effort I counted approximately 1,200 user selectable or modifiable options through menu options, dialog box inputs, etc. The actual number of features is incalculable, since the menu options available at any given point in an editing procedure are sensitive both to the location of the cursor in the document being edited and to contexts created by other options previously selected. Based on statistics provided to me by professional technical writers measuring their productivity using MS Word 95/97, 20-30% of their keyboard effort was nugatory due to loss and corruption of files or other software-based problems. Additional effort is lost trying to make Word's formatting functions work as they are advertised. "Master documents" and the paragraph numbering functions provided in Word have never worked properly). The answers provided by John McGhie explain why - http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/General/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm; http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/General/RecoverMasterDocs.htm. To simplify its user interface, Word 2000 hides infrequently used options by removing them from menu bars, which makes them even harder to find when they are needed!

Microsoft Antitrust links: http://www.cptech.org/ms/; http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/lit/microsoft/index.html; http://www.neramicrosoft.com/.

Liebowitz and Margolis. (1999). extract on word processors from Chapter 8 http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/book/wordprocessor/word.html and Evans, D.S., et. al. (1999) present comprehensive histories on the rise and fall of various personal computer applications. Note: NERA is a consultant to Microsoft on antitrust matters.

In some regards the Alto still represents the best implementation of the paper metaphore ever developed - the Alto recognised that paper documents are almost always presented in the 'portrait' mode, and used monitors in the portrait mode (long axis vertical!) Hiltzik (1999). Photograph: http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/0-3-XeroxAlto-text.htm. For whatever reason, today’s monitors are still virtually all landscape mode, making A4 or letter sized formats difficult to read if the whole page is displayed at one time. See also Johnson et. al (1998) for information on Xerox’s 1981 Star system.

Hart, S. (1999) summarises the competion between the various word processing systems.

Economides (2000) - http://raven.stern.nyu.edu/networks/ms/top.html, in several papers accessed through this site, provides a more neutral discussion of the network effects in relationship to the US vs Microsoft case.

Microsoft Word is infamous for its lack of backward compatibility between new versions of the product and its own older versions.  Content received from an older version into a new version is easily converted.  The new version may also have an optional capability to save a file in an older format. However users of older versions of Word who are unfortunate to be exchanging files with those who do not deliberately save files in the old format have no choice but to pay Microsoft for an upgrade to their system. Thus, once a few members of a business community upgrade their standards, other members of the community have been forced to update to be able to communicate with the early adopters. And, once businesses have been forced to upgrade, individual customers using word processors to communicate with the businesses have no choice but to upgrade also.

This comment is based on 15 years experience in various documentation system management roles in a multi-branch bank and a defence prime contractor.

In my own experience, when our major government client switched to MS Word and required us to deliver tender documents electronically in MS Word format, we had no choice but to comply. In order to communicate internally we had no choice but to standardise on MS Word and force our subcontractors to do the same. Now that we, the government, and our subcontractors all have substantial legacies of MS Word documents, all of us face major costs trying to convert to any other communication standard.

Most word processing systems offer authors many different ways to code format structures that look the same on screen or on paper. For example, MS Word 97's menu tree provides access to over 1000 different functions – without considering the fact that many functions at the ends of the branches themselves have numerous parameters that can be set to further alter the way they behave. Consequently, the semantic significance of formatting instructions cannot be reliably recognised by computer systems that do not actually comprehend the textual content of the document.

In fact, in some cases, depending on author preferences, the exact same application can either work with documents in the paper paradigm or in a semantic structure paradigm. Examples of such systems are Adobe FrameMaker and Corel WordPerfect. However, because of the fundamental differences between procedural and semantic markup, individual document files are never easily or reliably converted between a paper paradigm and a structural paradigm, even if the same application is used for both.

Hot metal typesetters were probably some of the more complex machines ever created for use by a single person. See Woodside Press's The Linotype: What it is - http://woodsidepress.com/LINOTYPE.HTML [http://web.archive.org/web/20011031115656/http://www..woodsidepress.com/LINOTYPE.HTML]; Melbourne Museum of Printing's Thematic Glossary of Typesetting (Hot Metal and Later) http://home..vicnet.net.au/~typo/glossary/theme-f.htm.

In advanced hot metal mechanical typesetting systems, the markup was encoded by particular combinations of holes in a paper tape. As the mechanical systems were replaced by electronic systems, binary electronic codes were used.

Microsoft took a somewhat different approach with its MS Word product, by placing most formatting instructions at the end of the document or after Section Breaks. These instructions then point to the areas of text they affect. It is this totally different formatting logic which has made conversion between MS Word and other word processing environments so difficult. The answers provided by John McGhie explain why - http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/General/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm; http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/General/RecoverMasterDocs.htm. Microsoft has partially rectified this problem by developing its openly defined but still proprietary Rich Text Format (RTF) markup language. RTF markup directly tags the blocks of text affected by most formatting instructions, but it still doesn’t solve the generic word processing problem that there are many different ways for the computer to code formats that look the same to human readers.

I first encountered GML in 1988 as a documentation manager in the information systems area of an IBM-based banking environment.

Defense requirements to standardise technical documentation (as expressed in CALS - Computer aided Acquisition and Lifecycle Support) policies and standards assisted the spread of SGML. The US Navy Digital Logistics Technical Data (CALS) page links to various standards - http://navycals.dt.navy.mil/ The NATO CALS site explains many of the benefits - http://www.dcnicn.com/ncmb/.

Currently available SGML authoring applications include FrameMaker, Epic  Editor, XMetaL.

Graham (2000) discusses the different versions of HTML and how different browsers interpret particular HTML elements. http://www.best.com/~sem/dark_side/ is an essay dating from 1995 or 1996 on some of the difficulties resulting from the early looseness in the HTML definition. The situation has not improved markedly up to the present time.

Some statistics, discussed in more depth in a later section make clear the magnitude of this revolution: The HTML DTD was finalised in 1993 (Sears, 1998- http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~wwwbtb/book/chap13/time.html). By January 2000 more than 1 Bn HTML Web pages have been published - http://www.inktomi.com/webmap/; http://www.inktomi.com/new/press/2000/billion.html; spread across more than 93 million hosts (growing from around 370,000 in 1991) - http://www.isc.org/ds/WWW-200007/index.html. By November 2001, Google claimed to have indexed more than 1.6 BN Web pages - http://www.google.com/. By August 2001, an estimated 513 million users worldwide use the Web; 180 million of these are in the USA and Canada - http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html.

Walsh, 1998. Also, inspection of the main XML sites will show that XML is still very much a program under development: http://www.w3.org/XML/; http://www.xml.com/; http://xml.coverpages.org/xml..html

Carleton University School of Business On Line Learning- Well-Formed XML - (2000) - http://www.online-learning.com/demos/xml/well_formed_xml.html.

Carleton University School of Business On Line Learning - Valid XML (2000) - http://www.online-learning.com/demos/xml/valid_xml.html.

Mesopotamian - , in Staikos, K.S. and Kontominas, D. (????) - [http://www.libraries.gr/nonmembers/en_messop.htm

Library History Group: The Universal Library: From Alexandria to the Internet - Second Anglo-German Seminar on Library History - http://www.cilip.org.uk/groups/lhg/alexandria.html.

See also: Bibliotheca Alexandrina: Intellectual Institutions - http://www.bibalex.org/MainFrames.asp?LangID=1&Type=1&ID=1&Name=no%20text&FacilityID=77&IsAbstract=1&TemplateID=1

A library takes shape: Books, benches and borrowers. in Vatican Exhibit - http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/vatican.exhibit/exhibit/a-vatican_lib/Takes_shape.html

Library.in  Encyclopaedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/6/0,5716,109616+1+106477,00.html [obsolete at 9 Nov. 2001 - try http://web.archive.org/web/20010210193907/http://britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/6/0,5716,109616+1+106477,00.html], provides an excellent review article on libraries covering library history, science, classification systems and administration. http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/course/fall1998/lis380/week07/cls_scheme.html summarizes the four major classification schemes.

Introduction to the Dewey Decimal Classification: History and Current Use. OCLC Forest Press - http://www.oclc.org/dewey/about/about_the_ddc.htm.

Library of Congress Classification Outline. Cataloging Policy and Support Office. Library of Congress - http://lcweb.loc..gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/lcco.html.

MacRae Library Handbook, Arrangement of Materials, Background on the Library of Congress System - http://www.nsac..ns.ca/lib/handbook/Section-3.htm gives a brief summary; American Treasures of the Library of Congress: MEMORY: The Order of Books (Monticello, May 7, [18]15) - http://lcweb..loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm027.html in American Treasures of the Library of Congress. The following is quoted from a polygraph copy of Thomas Jefferson's manuscript

...Yet on the whole I have preferred arrangement according to subject; because of the particular satisfaction, when we wish to consider a particular one, of seeing at a glance the books which have been written on it, and selecting those from which we expect most readily the information we seek.

 

 

Quoted from a facsimile copy of Jefferson's original letter to George Watterston (Monticello, May 7, [18]15) - http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/uc004882.jpg

The scope and history of the discipline are summarised in http://www.asis.org/AboutASIS/the-society.html

The Amsterdam printing of the Journal des sçavans -http://www.sil.si.edu/Libraries/Dibner/newacq_2000.htm, in Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology

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