The development of today electronic Information Management Systems stem from the works produced for war, and the means through which these works continued, thereafter.
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Source: p. 284 of Reason in Common Sense. The Life of Reason, by; George Santayana
As we continue to build upon the prior art forged to make the tools and instruments we use of today, many may reasonably consider it to be important, to garnish a level of understanding about relevant history.
This can in-turn be broken down into a number of constituents, starting, perhaps most importantly, with a means to illustrate the circumstances of political will and manifest outcomes brought about by the express works of societal leaders whose works formed some of the more critical historical steps, that have been brought about. My consideration being, that by reviewing the socio-environmental landscape, it can assist those considering current challenges, exhibited consequentially, and support means to evaluate how these systems have manifested themselves today and what could be considered, if we’re seeking to rectify known issues.
We all strive to improve safety and quality of life as experienced by ourselves and others.
The means to make use of the collective assets of human knowledge and our natural world, is critical to our means to meet our societal challenges. Communications technologies provides critical infrastructure for global cooperative development of solutions and our means to solve shared problems (and evolve new ones).
At the start of the 20th century one of the greatest challenges humanity faced, was the means to forge and maintain a reliable basis for trusted claims to be maintained and made use of. Whilst the moral purpose to preserved a shared ethical sense of dignity for acts; inclusive to how those acts became considered in historical terms; the need for supportive apparatus remain to be consistent and truely needed, as to make distinct good from bad, lawful to unlawful, and information as a class or category associated to knowledge.
During the time of the first and second world-war, our sciences were used as a means to cause destruction, and catastrophic damage, to societies and our environmental domiciles.
Security of personhood became universally sought. World leaders responded by formed an international environment for diplomacy by way of the United Nations (“UN”). Through works harboured by United Nations, a definition of universal human rights was established and agreed to by nations across the world.
These works on rights, forged a recording of universal shared values for all people throughout the world, make available in plain language, for use by the human race.
The consequence of these societal governance works led to providing the legal support for means through which the cooperative frameworks of mankind, to foster a new age of innovation and prosperity was born.
In effect, it was the realisation of a body of work that could be considered to have first made use of universal moral grammar.
In the post world-war II era, it was through the use of empathy, that humanity world-wide, first forged social tools to better equip corpus a means to process the various embodiments of ‘rule of law’, as to engender the means to ratify an underlying sense of the ‘spirit’ of law, that could be shared across jurisdictions. To make use of common principles, in circumstances of disagreement, and diplomacy.
These acts are amongst the most important, as to have “set the stage”, through which humanity was provided means to thrive; and to collectively benefit, from the creative works made by persons of disparate cultural and socioeconomic groups. These principles for peaceful economic growth were instrumental in ensuring means to promote and foster significant advancements of humanity, as a whole.
Therein and Thereafter; amongst the greatest influencing factors is international trade,
A constituent of works was founded upon forming appropriate principles for international trade and social alliances, as they pertain to the foundations of nationhood that tied the efforts of any person in any location in our natural world a means through which they may engage economically with others. In-turn, this occurred in an era where both communications and transportation technologies evolved rapidly (notably including the advent of the shipping container). This in-turn brought about the need to ensure delegate authorities, of provisional fiduciary responsibility relating to spatial regions (jurisdictions); maintained their social sense of sovereignty, and means to maintain ‘lands ruled by law’. Through this, humanity continued to garnished improved means for respect, consideration and tolerance of issues relating to cultural diversity, as mankind developed its modern, global economy.
In consideration; it is my view that it was through the seminal instruments brought together by way of the united nations, that our forum of international dialogue and means for cooperative advancement of shared interests; was brought about politically, as to engender the prosperous grounds for shared experiences. Through the fruits of these works, the sharing of knowledge and opportunity, freedoms of thought, movement and association became increasingly a field of political endeavour. Moreover, the means for a large proportion of humanity to participate in these affairs is something most still want to serve and protect.
The primary resource of human creativity; has been applied upon a foundation of principles defined by groups such as the UN. This in-turn, has provided the necessary basis of support required for the advancement of technology through Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (or S.T.E.A.M to to include art or creativity) that delivers our means to define what is our shared manifestation of our present shared and containerised sense of reality. Both as individuals, and as members of various groups, we have applied the use of science to discover, produce and make use of tools that employ the electromagnetic spectrum as to make temporal notations of our natural world. We have formed a series of artificial tools and structures, used to manage how we communicate, live together, share interests, maintain life in peace.
In 2045, The Atlantic published an article by Vannevar Bush titled ‘As We May Think’. Dr. Vannevar Bush had coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science for warfare; and his article (and related works) are considered to have been instrumental to the means through which incentive were defined for scientists when the fighting had ceased.
Dr. Bush urged men of science to turn to the task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.
“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory”. “For years inventions have extended man’s physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.” the editor remarks.
This record was later a constituent of the remarks made by Ted Nelson in 1965 as he recorded and presented his views on “A File Structure for The Complex, The Changing and the Indeterminate” , in which he declares,
“THE KINDS OF FILE structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing. They need to provide the capacity for intricate and idiosyncratic arrangements, total modifiability, undecided alternatives, and thorough internal documentation.”
The (creative) works of Ted Nelson went on to declare a conceptual frameworks in which he presented his ideas of a Evolutionary File Structure (ELF), as a form of electronic list packaging framework for documents; in which his design extended by way of a “Personalized Retrieval, Indexing, and Documentation Evolutionary” System (PRIDE). At this time Ted Nelson, perhaps more importantly, went about defining a method in which to produce a system for the storage of knowledge on computing systems and in so doing, defined the terms HyperText and HyperMedia introducing the word “hypertext” as a be defined method to address the the problem he described in the following way;
“a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it. Let me suggest that such an object and system, properly designed and administered, could have great potential for education, increasing the student’s range of choices, his sense of freedom, his motivation, and his intellectual grasp.”
Ted Nelson went on to illustrate his concept as to include HyperFilm as one form of HyperMedia.
Between 1965 and the 1980s computing technology continued to advance and become more accessible as an international communications networks became a part of life in many homes; and the proliferation of related appliances became more accessible for individuals; which in-turn promoted rapid growth in institutions and the means for which information and media technologies extended to the ‘desktops’ of professionals, replacing typewriters, calculators, classical inspection, observation and information management tools.
The work by Robert Elliot Kahn & Vinton Gray Cerf on internet protocol (TCP/IP) considered to have started from 1975 emerged as to make available Internet from the mid-1980s and was made available to connect computers throughout the world over telecommunications systems providing a universally compatible means to communicate information between computing systems world wide.
Tim Berners-Lee, working with CERN submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall In March 1989. Sendall wrote on the proposal ‘Vague, but exciting’, and allowed Berners-Lee to continue.
The proposal concerned the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.
source: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
Tim Berners-Lee was afforded the opportunity to make these works of art available to the world, royalty free, and the use of his works exploded rapidly.
In 1992 Cerf and Kahn formed the Internet Society to foster and guide the growth and development of ‘The Internet’.
At around the same time Tim Berners-Lee, in an effort to form a means in which to manage the growth of work founded upon his invention/s ‘The World Wide Web’, in a manner that maintained the means for the environment created as a result be produced by means that ensured the tools required to participate and contribute were ‘free from royalty’ encumbrances for all who wanted to use it; In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in collaboration with CERN, with support from DARPA and the European Commission. In April 1995, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) became the first European W3C host, followed by Keio University of Japan (Shonan Fujisawa Campus) in Asia in 1996
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed to become an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C’s mission is to lead the Web to its full potential W3C’s mission is to lead the Web to its full potential. and a W3C Patent Policy, governs the handling of patents in the process of producing Web standards. The goal of this policy is to assure that Recommendations produced under this policy can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis.
These works (and many others) have been instrumental to the foundation of Internet Governance humanity depends upon today. Yet, in consideration, it is the case that these remarkable changes have occurred in a period of time that is within the living history of those who today, remember the war.
Whilst those people do not necessarily know how to use our modern technology, those who do weren’t alive when the world was making critical decisions post-war. The lack of comprehension of our world before modern science and the benefits of those works, as is the case for example with modern medicine.
It was the case that the world decided to build the means to trust in each-other. This was the foundation through which, we now live with “fake news”. The concepts of war are not anywhere near as new as the medium through which modern warfare is moreover carried out in utility of technology, on many levels.
The means through which decisions were made by those who are elders of today, was based on personal relationships and systems that did not rely upon database technologies or the design of web-systems, as is used to define people today. As those critical, global decisions were being made; it was mostly printed products, that assisted communities who were more-often interpersonally known to each-other, that formed the means through which decisions of importance; were made. Today that is not so much the case.
History does help tell a story about how it has become that whilst legal personalities of all forms now rely upon the use of database related, information technologies; that the systems to support people, still haven’t been made. It is considered that the reason why this is the case, is due to how it all came about.
We can of course change these circumstances, as others changed theirs and those of their community, before our time was brought about to be challenged to do the same.
There are a few other related, yet distinct considerations with respect to economics and banking that i’ll cover in a seperate article, that will be linked-here – when its been uploaded.