Remaking the World by Henry Petroski

Author:Henry Petroski [Petroski, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77320-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Radio broadcast on the occasion of the first crossing of the Delaware River Bridge, now the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, while under construction in 1924 (photo credit 11.1)

Personal computers, which increasingly began to be networked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, were first connected via cables that have become the bane of installing and moving any computer equipment. The Internet and the World Wide Web have become the routine form of electronic communication among computers, and they have provided a kind of broadcasting medium into which anyone with a computer-receiver can dip, dive, and surf. Hallways, walls, and floors of offices and homes everywhere have come to be strung with wires and cables that connect to telephone lines, ethernets, and fiber-optic cables that have come more and more to be exposed rather than installed with a sense of workmanship.

The computer network thus became a form of wired communication, and inventors and engineers everywhere were being challenged, as Marconi was with radio, to enable personal computers to communicate with each other (and sometimes privately) in a wireless way. As cellular telephones in effect fulfilled the dream of Marconi for wireless point-to-point communication, so computer users can expect developments in the not too distant future to provide them with cellular computers that capture data out of thin air in much the way that they now can listen in on, if not participate in, international radio talk shows while commuting in their automobiles. What exact form the next technologies will take is less certain than we might at first imagine, however, because tensions of the kind between wired and wireless will always pull technologists in ways of which even they cannot be fully aware. The only certain thing is that the evolution of technology, whether wired or wireless, has been, is, and always will be full of surprises, promises, and twists.

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