New Media Reader 35-72

Vannevar Bush’s essay, “As We May Think”, written in 1945, calls the wartime scientists and researchers to transfer their efforts to the research of making human knowledge more accessible. This essay also developed New Media in a radical way by getting large amounts of government funding from Franklin Roosevelt for the research between military, industry and academic areas, becoming known as the “iron triangle”. In his essay, he also develops a theoretical idea for hyperlinks. He creates the “memex”, which is essentially microfilm that contains libraries of information that can be electronically linked to each other. Bush was never able to see the actual creation of the World Wide Web, but his essay was key in its development.

Alan Turing in 1950 wrote an essay called “Computing Michinery, and Intelligence”, which discusses the theory of creating artificial intelligence. In this essay, he discusses the various arguments for and against the ability for a machine to independently think. He begins the essay by proposing a new question to replace the obscure question of “can machines think?” to what he calls the “imitation game”. It is a test where a person blindly asks questions to a machine and a human to determine which is a machine. If the computer can fool the interrogator, then it has intelligence.
Grace Murray Hooper in 1952 developed the first compiler. She created a computer programming language which is used to control the behavior of a computer. She is a product of Bush’s “iron triangle” as a military employee she developed computer programming that led to the development of all types of computer programs.

1954 – Norbert Wiener began working toward cybernetics, which is “the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.” (Apple Dictionary). Wrote the essay Men, Machines, and the World About.

Ivan Sutherland in 1988 created the program Sketchpad.

Douglas Engelbart was inventor of the computer mouse, he worked on a team that developed the hypertext, and was a key contributor to the creation of ARPANET, which was the prototype for the internet.