Info Tech & Reference Library

Alan Turing (1912 - 1954) - English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptoanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. Dr. Turing (with a PhD. in maths from Princeton University) was an enormous influence on the development of theoretical computer science. His Turing Machine helped to formalize the concepts of algorithms and computation and was a model of the general-purpose computer. For these and other great accomplishents, Dr. Turing is known worldwide as "The Father of Theoretical Computer Science."

Anybody who may have come here seeking proofreading, editorial and web-based tutoring services may also benefit from thoughtful immersion in the section below. It highlights INFORMATION & COMPUTER SCIENCE from its infancy to today, and also provides some RESOURCE and REFERENCE books which have infinite applicability in more fields and endeavors than you might imagine. And if certain clever memes and related informative videos catch my fancy, I'll stuff them below as well.

Steve Minton, "Editor at Large" and "Literary Renegade On the Run" - Apex Nexus Proofreading & Editing

The Sumerian Abacus: Appeared between 2700 and 2300 BC, and "It held a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal (base 60) number system ." (Wikipedia)

The Salamis Tablet: A marble counting board, dating from around 300 BC, discovered in 1846 on the Greek island of Salamis. Preceding the abacus in its part of the world, the Salamis tablet was widely considered to represent an ancient Greek method of mathematical calculation which once was common in the ancient world.

An early analog computing device: The Antikythera mechanism, dating from ancient Greece circa 150 - 100 BCE. It was designed to calculate astronomical positions.

Charles Babbage's Difference Engine (1892, now at Intellectual Ventures laboratory in Seattle). Babbage designed his automatic mechanical calculator to compute astronomical and mathematical tables, as well as aid in navigational computations.

The first programmable, fully automatic, digital (electromechanical) computer, Konrad Zuse's Turing-Complete Z3 became fully operational in May 1941. Zuse, a German civil engineer, computer scientist, inventor and businessman, also invented the S2 computing machine, known as the world's first process control computer.

Source and assumed (C) RedHotCyber dot com.

"The Mother of All Demos" was a landmark computer demonstration of developments by the Augmentation Research Center, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968.[1] The name The Mother of All Demos has been retroactively applied to the demonstration.

The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying concepts and technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.

Wikipedia

Surprise bonus!

Thought-provoking videos from futurists who even back in the 60s were on the cutting edge, and can still shed light on the dizzying technological/socio-cultural/epochal changes that are happening today. You're about to discover, or REDISCOVER, one of the greatest reference and resource books and portals to "Access to Tools" ever created: The Whole Earth Catalog, which was a pivotal force in bringing about the revolutions we live with daily today, in computer science and networking, the environmental movement, and the concept of world sustainability in general, along with many other breakthrough ideas and practical D.I.Y. implementations that had never before been packaged into such an enormous compendium of usefulness. Their countercultural vision of god-like access to information, planetary responsibility and a more autonomous style of living is now in many ways mainstream. Way before Google, a copy of the giant-sized Catalog was a gateway into the limitless expanse of human knowledge. No wonder Steve Jobs was so fond of it as a youth!

"When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions."

Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commencement Speech 2005

Per Perplexity.AI:
Ted Nelson's concept of "deep links" was quite different from how the term is commonly used today. Here's what Nelson meant by deep links:

Two-way connections: Nelson envisioned links that were bidirectional, allowing users to easily navigate back and forth between connected pieces of content. This is in contrast to the one-way links we typically see on the web today.
Visible connections: Nelson wanted links to be visible and traceable, allowing users to see the relationships between different pieces of content. This would enable users to follow "trails of information" and track conversations across the web.
Links as separate objects: Nelson saw links as distinct entities from the content itself, rather than just being embedded within text.
Beyond simple navigation: Nelson's deep links were meant to be more than just navigational tools. They were intended to create meaningful connections between ideas and facilitate deeper understanding
Part of a larger system: Deep links were just one component of Nelson's broader vision for hypertext, which included features like "unbreakable links," "copyright simplification," and "deep version management".

It's important to note that Nelson's concept of deep links is quite different from how the term is used in modern web development. Today, "deep links" often refer to links that bypass a website's homepage to take users directly to specific content, or to links between mobile apps. Nelson's vision was much more expansive and aimed at creating a richer, more interconnected web of knowledge.

Nelson has expressed frustration that his ideas were not fully understood or implemented in the development of the World Wide Web. He saw the web as a simplified version of his vision, lacking many of the features he believed were crucial for a truly interconnected system of knowledge.

See also Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu (founded 1960):

https://archive.org/details/pub_whole-earth-catalog

Aforementioned info tech pioneer, philosopher and sociologist Ted Nelson, in his unassuming but deeply influential flip book Computer Lib/Dream Machines (self-published 1974, republished 1987 by Microsoft Press) envisioned new possibilities for computers, and repurposed their utility. No longer were they to be seen mainly as monolithic bureaucratic beasts performing as glorified number and data-crunching devices. Dreamy Ted envisioned them as "Dream Machines," screen worlds of possibility upon which we as artists could use to transform into a canvas for our imaginative artistry, whether expressed in text, audio, graphics or video:

https://archive.org/details/computer-lib-dream-machines