và thậm chí dễ dàng cho một người mới để chương trình. Đối với tất cả giới hạn của nó, HyperCard đưa các khái niệm của văn bản và đồ họa phi tuyến ra khỏi phòng thí nghiệm. Trong giữa tất cả mà mọc lên Internet, với một nhu cầu đột ngột và u | Conclusion The Digitization of the World Picture 347 by miniature digital computers programmed to emulate them most ordinary radios for example had lost their tuning dial by 1973 and were tuned by digital keypads. Ten years later Time proclaimed the computer Machine of the Year for 1983 with the opening headline The Computer Moves In. 5 The latest manifestation of this takeover is the Internet embraced across the political and cultural spectrum by Newt Gingrich Al Gore Stewart Brand the late Timothy Leary Generation X and numerous people in between. Most accounts describe it as a marriage of communications and The evidence presented here suggests otherwise that the Internet simply represents yet another takeover by digital computing of an activity telecommunications that had a long histor y based on analog techniques. Those who so glowingly describe the World Wide Web as the culmination of fifty years of prologue either do not know or have forgotten history. The very same statements were made when the first UNIVACs were installed when minicomputers and time-sharing appeared and when the personal computer was introduced figure . This will not be the last time these words are spoken. But promises of a technological Utopia have been common in American histor y and at least a few champions of the Internet are aware of how naive these earlier visions Silicon Valley has some of the most congested real highways in the countr y as people commute to work with a technology that Henr y Ford invented to reduce urban congestion. Most people have some sense of the fact that the automobile did not fulfill many of Ford s promises simply because it was too successful. The word smog crept into the English language around the time of Ford s death in the late 1940s gridlock strip malls and suburban sprawl came later. What equivalent will describe the dark side of networked digital computing And will those side effects become evident only fifty years from now as
