history of computing

This dissertation offers a history of hypertext, and does not reference any creative works of electronic literature. It has many references to critical writing that is important in the study of electronic literature. The following is the author's abstract: ---

How does one write the history of a technical machine? Can we say that technical machines have their own genealogies, their own evolutionary dynamic? The technical artefact constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or a line. At a cursory level, we can see this in the fact that technical machines come in generations - they adapt and adopt characteristics over time, one suppressing the other as it becomes obsolete. It is argued that technics has its own evolutionary dynamic, and that this dynamic stems neither from biology nor from human societies. Yet 'it is impossible to deny the role of human thought in the creation of technical artefacts' (Guattari 1995, p. 37). Stones do not automatically rise up into a wall - humans 'invent' technical objects. This, then, raises the question of technical memory. Is it humans that remember previous generations of machines and transfer their characteristics to new machines? If so, how and where do they remember them? It is suggested that humans learn techniques from technical artefacts, and transfer these between machines. This theory of technical evolution is then used to understand the genealogy of hypertext. The historical differentiations of hypertext in different technical systems is traced. Hypertext is defined as both a technical artefact and also a set of techniques: both are a part of this third milieu, technics. The difference between technical artefact and technical vision is highlighted, and it is suggested that technique and vision change when they are externalised as material artefact. The primary technique traced is association, the organisational principle behind the hypertext systems explored in the manuscript. In conclusion, invention is shown to be an act of exhumation, the transfer and retroactiviation of techniques from the past. This thesis presents an argument for a new model of technical evolution, a model which claims that technics constitutes its own dynamic, and that this dynamic exceeds human evolution. It traces the genealogy of hypertext as a set of techniques and as series of material artefacts. To create this geneaology I draw on interviews conducted with Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and Andries van Dam, as well as a wide variety of primary and secondary resources.

Source: author's abstract

Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment, has been widely used for writing, reading, and research for nearly fifteen years. The appearance of a new implementation provides a suitable occasion to review the design of Storyspace, both in its historical context and in the context of contemporary research. Of particular interest is the opportunity to examine its use in a variety of published documents, all created within one system, but spanning the most of the history of literary hypertext.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This paper is interesting for the technical background it provides on many often-analysed works of electronic literature.

We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles’s latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices.

My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. 

(Source: University of Chicago Press catalog copy)

CONTENTS

AcknowledgmentsPrologue: Computing KinPart I. Making: Language and Code1. Intermediation: Textuality and the Regime of Computation2. Speech, Writing, Code: Three Worldviews3. The Dream of Information: Escape and Constraint in the Bodies of Three FictionsPart II. Storing: Print and Etext4. Translating Media5. Performative Code and Figurative Language: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon6. Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork GirlPart III. Transmitting: Analog and Digital7. (Un)masking the Agent: Stanislaw Lem’s "The Mask"8. Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us9. Subjective Cosmology and the Regime of Computation: Intermediation in Greg Egan’s FictionEpilogue: Recursion and EmergenceNotesWorks CitedIndex