Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Considerfilm of the same thickness as paper, although thinnerfilm will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 betweenthe bulk of the ordinary record on books, and itsmicrofilm replica. The Encyclopaedia Britannica couldbe reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library ofa million volumes could be compressed into one endof a desk. I f the human race has produced since theinvention of movable type a total record, in the formof magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertisingblurbs, correspondence, having a volume correspondingto a billion books, the whole affair, assembled andcompressed, could be lugged off in a moving van.Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needsnot only to make and store a record but also be able toconsult it, and this aspect of the m atter comes later.Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.

What are the scientists to donext?

Th is has not been a scientist’s war; it has been awar in which all have had a par

“Computers,” he writes, “created the technological possibility of the Cold War and shaped its political atmosphere.” And, in turn, “the Cold War shaped computer technology.” Cold War politics “became embedded in the machines,” including their “technical design,” and the “machines helped make possible its politics.”

Edwards contends that the digital computer is both cause and effect of what he calls the Cold War’s “closed-world discourse, which he defines as “the language, technologies, and practices that together supported the visions of centrally controlled, automated global power at the heart of American Cold War politics.

o one had really figured out what the network was good for; as late as the fall of 1971, network traffic was barely 2 percent of what it could potentially handle; it was, as Hafner and Lyon nicely put it, “like a highway system without cars.”13

By de-emphasizing the social and political contexts in which the Net was built, Hafner and Lyon tell a story that most engineers would like-a tale of adventurous young men motivated by technical curiosity and largely unaffected by larger ideological currents or even narrower motives of self-advancement or economic enrichment.

The rise of the Net needs to be rooted in the 1960s–in both the “closed world” of the Cold War and the open and decentralized world of the antiwar movement and the counterculture.

Few will share Wired publisher Louis Rossetto’s hyperbolic claim that the digital revolution presages “social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.1”

Take a look at the standard textbooks on post-World War II America. You will search in vain through the index for references to the Internet or its predecessor, the ARPANET; even mentions of “computers” are few and far between. The gap is hardly a unique fault of these authors; after all, before 1988, the New York Times mentioned the Internet only once– in a brief aside. Still, it is a fair guess that the textbooks of the next century will devote considerable attention to the Internet and the larger changes in information and communications technology that have emerged so dramatically in recent years.