This learning path was inspired by the book "The Game" written by Alessandro Baricco.
The digital revolution starts in 1978, the Year Zero, when the video game "Space Invaders" was created. What changed after "Space Invaders"? Everything changed, particularly
The Classical Age
From the Commodore 64 to Google
1981 - 1984:
the personal computer was born!
Personal was the keyword
the personal computer was born!
Personal was the keyword
The digital revolution starts in 1978, the Year Zero, when the video game "Space Invaders" was created. What changed after "Space Invaders"? Everything changed, particularly
1) The posture: man - keys - screen all embedded
2) The content: Space Invaders had inside the infinity
3) The shape: it was a unique environment which could include all the environments.
4) The nature: it was a game.
We can find all those features either in a smart phone or in Spotify, just to make few examples.
Watch the video and write down the ten Arcade Games.
The digital revolution started with three acts:
1) The personal computer
IBM PC
The Commodore 64
Apple Mac
2) The digitalization of texts, sounds and images
The first music CD (Richard Strauss' Symphony of the Alps) was launched by Philips (the Netherlands) and Sony (Japan) in 1982. The first digital camera was created in 1988. In 1993 a group of European researchers invented the MP3. The concept of format compression was also applied to images (jpeg) and to videos (mpeg). In 1995 films were digitalized. Philips sold the first DVD. Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic sold other DVDs and the VHS was dead.
3) The creation of a network of computers
The first computer network was ARPANET, a military network, created in the sixties. On 29th October 1969 a message was sent from a computer in UCLA. Half of that message reached San Francisco in real time. In 1974 two American computer engineers invented a protocol which allowed a network between the world different network formats. Its name was TCP/IP or INTERNET and it was the seventies. The first mail protocol was published in 1981. Its name was SMTP, but the first mail was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, a thirty-year-old American. In 2012 people sent 144 billions of mails a day: three out of four were spam. In 1990 a British computer engineer, Tim Berners-Lee, who worked at CERN in Geneva, started the World Wide Web and changed the world. He worked on an American computer called NEXT, produced by a Californian company whose founder was a certain Steve Jobs. Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in 3 steps:
1) He thought not only to connect all the computers, but also their files. He made a copy of all his file contents and put them in a place called "place" or better site, namely a website.
2) He connected all the files through links.
3) He made it public and free, namely open source. He created the World Wide Web which was a web wide as the world. It was for everybody and one could find what he or she needed.
In a time when nobody knew anything about the web, Tim Berners-Lee defined it as follows:
The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.
A hypertext is a non-linear text which has the shape of a web or a net. The web was a digital copy of the world. It was an OTHERWORLD. The digital otherworld rotates around the first one, creating a single system reality founded on a double driving force.
In 1991 there was only one website. In 1992 there were ten websites. In 1993 there were 130 websites. In 1994 there were 2,738 websites. In 1995 there were 23,500 websites. In 1996 there were 257,601 websites. In 2018 there were 1,284,792 websites. In 1993 Mosaic, the first browser, was created by two University Students from Illinois. The web was a parallel world more real than the real one. In 1994 Yahoo! was created by two students from the Stanford University. In 1995 Bill Gates launched Windows 95. In 1995 eBay was founded in California. In 1997 Reed Hastings and software executive Marc Randolph co-found Netflix to offer online movie rentals; Netflix debuts a subscription service in 1999, offering unlimited DVD rentals for one low monthly price. In 1998 two students from the Stanford University, Sergej Brin and Larry Page founded Google, the most visited website in the world.
In 1994 Jeff Bezos founded Cadabra (the first name of Amazon) which, in the beginning, was just an on-line bookshop.
In 1994 IBM created the first smartphone
In 1994 Sony created the first playstation
Some consequences of the Digital Revolution:
1) End of mediation between human beings and things
2) Direct drive or real time
3) Freedom of the individual
4) Destruction of the traditional elite group
5) Creation of a new elite group
6) Dematerialization
7) Augmented Humanity
Final Questions:
Did this digital revolution determine an anthropological metamorphosis out of control? Did anybody check the impact this revolution had on human beings and on our idea of good and evil?
Stanford University, San Francisco, 12th, June, 2005
The famous final words "stay hungry, stay foolish" are not Steve Jobs' words. They belong to a book called Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand. It was a catalog of objects and tools one could use in order to live in a free and independent way on Earth. You could learn how to knit a sweater and how to use a computer.
Stewart Brand belongs to the hippy counter-culture of the sixties. In 1968 an inventor, Douglas Engelbart, showed the first mouse for computer, the first teleconference, the first writing software, the first interactive computer at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. His assistant was Stewart Brand.
Stewart Brand claimed that "computer gave human beings a personal power" and he considered the cyberspace a sort promised land. In 1974 Stewart Brand coined the phrase "personal computer". He was Steve Jobs hero. They were all hippy hackers. A very interesting Stewart Brand's quotes goes "a lot of people try to change the nature of human beings, but it's a real loss of time. One can't change the nature of human beings; what one can change is the tools they use, the techniques. Then one will change civilization.
