I just delivered a keynote on the technology integration of man, and will be expanding on this concept in another three weeks, so it makes sense to share some of these thoughts with you. There is too much to do in one sitting so I will break this up into a few streams. I have delineated ten phases, four before this moment, and six to come, and we will cover the first two of them here.

In order to do this, I want you to step back and think about the time we live in now as being in the middle of a 100 year continuum. We can go back 50 years and review how technology has blossomed for us, then look forward 50 years to what it will become. It is helpful to view our time in this way because it will make you conscious that we are on a fantastic journey of integrating technology into our lives, and early enough with it still that we do not really understand the impact. It is not only the fact that we are becoming more dependent on technology that is interesting, but also what it is, and will, do to us as human beings.

In the beginning, we have basic calculating machines. These were mechanical and had no electrical parts. A person could press a series of buttons and then pull down a handle to get an answer to some mathematical question. These actually came to being around the turn of the century, and were the only devices that could be classified as information technology because they were the first devices that could create a piece of knowledge for us mechanically. (Well, that is if you set aside the abacus.) The only impact these had on our lives was to speed up the ability to do simple math. Yet, they also created a fork in the road because for the first time, we could assemble a machine that calculated something on our behalf so that our minds did not have to go through the process or calculating. The impact on our lives was minimal because these devices really helped with small tasks on a small scale. It is important to understand that this first phase lasted for decades, and was only replaced with the advent of mainframes.

Era Two is signified by the growth and development of mainframes. We now moved out of the realm of a mechanical device that could calculate to an electronic device. This was a huge change in the scale of calculation that could be done because now, for the first time, a machine was able to crunch numbers and data at a speed and level of accuracy that was not really possible by a team of humans. Sure, we could do the math, but it would take too long to get it done, and any weak link in the chain of humans would cause a major deficiency.

They were called ‘thinking machines’ at times because to humans in that day, the machines actually offloaded the task of calculating on a huge scale and this made the machines appear to be able to think. Of course they only processed data that was fed to them in strict means of holes in punch cards or the like. The impact of mainframes was very different than the mechanical calculators before them. Mainframes were used in World War II with great impact. They invented secret codes, broke secret codes, processed huge amounts of military data, and allowed man to find answers inside of data that had been locked away heretofore. This time, technology became indispensable to man, and for the first time, proved itself to be able to change world events. Once again, this phase lasted for decades before the next phase came to be…

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com