Conceptual Paradigm

• (1) The Digital Principle
  
  
  • Digital principle is mathematically general:
    
    

    Herman Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, p. 143: "[The digital approach] is the realization that a machine can be built to imitate the human method of calculating: to count and to build up the elementary operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division—by counting. Not only can this be done but it may be shown that, in general, mathematical formulations may be handled by means of these elementary operations. . . . suffice it to say that for our purposes numerical mathematics can be built up out of the elementary processes of counting, and therefore that this approach has a very real sense of universality or general purposeness about it."

    
    
  • Digital principle (specifically, base-two system) is logically general:
    
    

    George Boole (1815-1864) and the Boolean fusion of algebra and logic: "Let us conceive, then, of an Algebra in which the symbols x, y, z, &c. admit indifferently of the values 0 and 1, and of these values alone. The laws, the axioms, and the processes, of such an Algebra will be identical in their whole extent with the laws, the axioms, and the processes of an Algebra of Logic."

    
    Such logic was suited to the new, fast technology: vacuum tubes, relays, transistors (definition; William Shockley's early "sandwich transistor"), Claude Shannon's master's thesis on the relation between switching circuits and Boolean algebra.
    
    In a sense, the generality of digital mathematics and logic compensated for the "crisis of mathematics" earlier in the 20th century: Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem
    
    
• (2) The von Neumann computer architecture
  (First formulated in von Neumann's A First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (June 1945):
  
  
  • Sequential, linear calculation (counting and accumulating operations)
    
    
  • Separation of processing from memory
    
    
  • Stored program principle:
    
    • Fast access to both instructions and data
    • Equivalence of programming instructions and data (both are "writable")
      
      
• In essence: a new model of "thinking"
  
  
• Compare literary treatments of the problem of memory (e.g., Pynchon, Gibson, Falco, Coverley)

Implementation:

• Hardware Setup:
  
  
  • gigantic central computers, controlled by MIS (Management Information Services) Departments (IBM 7094)
    
    
  • little "dumb terminals," assigned to data-entry clerical pools (IBM 24 Key Punch Operators in the 1970s)
    
    
• Typical Software: custom-coded, proprietary, "vertical" applications
  
  
• Theater of Operation: the "vertically-integrated" company (autonomous, non-networked to the outside world)
  

Social and Cultural Paradigm (Cold War Paradigm):

• Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [HAL] [Monolith]
  
• Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 86: "The population is now cognizant of being surveilled constantly by databases and it apparently feels ill at ease as a result. Database anxiety has not of yet developed into an issue of national political prominence but it is clearly a growing concern of many and bespeaks a new level of what Foucault calls the normalization of the population" (Poster is discussing the database as "super-panopticon")
  
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979)
  
• Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843) (on the Panopticon)
  

• The "Client/Server" principle (personal computer or workstation networked to a microprocessor-based server). Applications and processing distributed between client and server machines. Example: accessing and rendering a Web page
  
  
• The "Packet" principle (TCP/IP)
  
  
• The "Network" principle (for visualizations, see for example An Atlas of Cyberspaces)
  
  
  • decentralized or multi-centralized / non-hierarchical or multi-hierarchical
    
    
  • "emergent" complexity / "hive" behavior

Social and Cultural Paradigm: (to be continued in future lectures): (see sections in course schedule on Information as Work and Power and Information as Identity)

from Microsoft Press Computer Dictionary, 3rd. ed. (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1997):

• TCP: "The protocol within TCP/IP that governs the breakup of data messages into packets to be sent via IP, and the reassembly and verification of the complete messages from packets received by IP"
  
• IP: "The protocol within TCP/IP that governs the breakup of data messages into packets, the routing of the packets from sender to destination network and station, and the reassembly of the packets into the original data messages at the destination."
  
• Packet-Switching: "A message-delivery technique in which small units of information (packets) are relayed through stations in a computer network along the best route available between the source and the destination. A packet-switching network handles information in small units, breaking long messages into multiple packets before routing. Although each packet may travel along a different path, and the packets composing a message may arrive at different times or out of sequence, the receiving computer reassembles the original message correctly [ . . . ]. The Internet is an example of a packet-switching network."
  
• Packet: "In packet-switching networks, a transmission unit of fixed maximum size that consists of binary digits representing both data and a header containing an identification number, source and destination addresses, and sometimes error-control data."