INFO 202 Chap.2 History of Information and Information Technology
History of Information and Information Technology
What this week asks of a history
The syllabus describes the second week as a survey of where technologies came from, what they were intended to do and what they did without anyone planning it. Its emphasis falls on distribution and power: who ended up better off, who carried the costs, and which arrangements of control a technology set up or reinforced. That makes history a working tool rather than background.
When you study an information technology in this course, you are expected to ask about its origins and its winners and losers, not only about how it works.
Combinatorial evolution and the Web's ancestry
The lecture borrows Arthur's term combinatorial evolution for the idea that inventions are assembled from earlier technologies.
The Wright Flyer of 1903 is its first illustration, drawing on gliders, bicycles, engines and aerodynamics. The World Wide Web, dated 1989 on the slide, gets the same treatment: hypertext, markup languages, packet switching, internet protocols, the domain name system, Engelbart's NLS and Bush's memex all appear as parts.
The Web project's own early page presented it as a hypermedia effort to give universal access to a large collection of documents.
Vannevar Bush and associative indexing
Bush wrote As We May Think in 1945, at the end of the war effort in which he had coordinated thousands of scientists.
He argued that the record of research had outgrown the means of consulting it, and he blamed rigid indexing, which files an item in one place and makes each search start from scratch. He proposed the memex, a microfilm desk for personal records whose defining feature was associative indexing: linking any two items and chaining links into named trails that could be replayed and passed to others.
Berners-Lee's 1996 retrospective, quoted in lecture, runs the line from the memex through Engelbart and Ted Nelson to the Web, and names the obstacle physicists faced around 1980: machines that could not read each other's networks, disks, data formats or character encodings.
Questioning the great inventor
The final slides attach scare quotes first to great and then to man.
Elisha Gray's telephone caveat and Alexander Graham Bell's notebook, both from 1876, show rival inventors working in parallel. A chart from Wuchty and colleagues (2007) tracks team-produced work and team size across research fields and patents over four decades, pointing attention toward collaboration.
The lecture also frames innovation as meaningful combination of information bits across collection, transmission and analysis, achieved at scale and at a cost that makes sense. Discussion prompts ask which breakthrough most improved one of those three jobs and when a narrative has distorted how the public sees a technology.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Origins, intended purposes and unintended consequences of a technology
- 02
Who gains and who loses: distribution and power in tech history
- 03
Combinatorial evolution and the Wright Flyer's ingredients
- 04
The World Wide Web as a combination of older technologies
- 05
Bush's memex, associative indexing and trails
- 06
From memex to Web in Berners-Lee's own account
- 07
The great man critique: Bell, Gray and simultaneous invention
- 08
Team science and the Wuchty et al. chart
- 09
Collection, transmission and analysis at scale
Worked example · free
Rebuild the lone-inventor story of the Web
- 3Explain combinatorial evolution and list at least four ingredients the lecture gives for the Web.
- 2Place Bush's associative indexing in the Web's lineage and say what problem it addressed.
- 2Apply the great man critique and restate the claim in collective terms.
Key terms
- Combinatorial Evolution
- Arthur's account of innovation in which new technologies are built mainly by combining existing technologies, so every invention has an ancestry of earlier parts rather than a single origin.
- Memex
- A desk-sized personal information machine proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945 that would store books, records and notes on microfilm and let the user link items together for rapid consultation.
- Associative Indexing
- Bush's proposed method of organizing records by joining any item directly to another chosen item, so that retrieval follows a chain of connections instead of descending through a fixed classification.
- Trail
- A named sequence of linked items in Bush's memex that can be replayed later, extended with comments and side branches, and copied into another person's memex.
- Hypertext
- Text that contains links a reader can follow to other text; the word was coined by Ted Nelson, and Berners-Lee places it between the memex and the Web.
- Great Man Theory
- A way of telling history that credits change to exceptional individuals; this course questions both the uniqueness of the celebrated inventor and whose contributions the story omits.
History of Information and Information Technology FAQ
What is combinatorial evolution in the history of technology?
It is the idea, associated with Arthur (2009), that new technologies come mostly from recombining earlier ones. The lecture shows the Wright Flyer drawing on gliders, bicycle technology, propulsion systems, engines and aerodynamics, and the Web drawing on hypertext, packet switching, internet protocols, the domain name system and the memex. The practical point is that an invention has many contributors, not one.
Why is Vannevar Bush's As We May Think still read in information science courses?
Bush saw in 1945 that scientific findings were outgrowing the tools for consulting them, and he traced the problem to rigid indexing. His proposed memex would let users link documents directly and build shareable trails of connections. Berners-Lee later cited the memex as the starting point of the ideas behind hypertext, so the essay is treated as an early statement of the logic of the Web.
Did Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone alone?
Bell holds the famous credit, but the lecture pairs his March 1876 notebook with Elisha Gray's caveat, filed the month before, for instruments sending vocal sounds by telegraph. The pairing is used to show that several inventors often reach the same idea at about the same time, which is one reason the course treats single-inventor stories with caution.
Exam move
Draw two short family trees from memory: one for the Wright Flyer and one for the Web, listing every ingredient the lecture gives. Next to the Web tree, add Bush, Engelbart, Nelson and the 1980 incompatibility problem in the order Berners-Lee tells them.
Then pick any recent technology and write three sentences: its ingredients, the job it improved among collection, transmission and analysis, and one person or group its usual origin story leaves out.
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