Fifty years ago the world thought it was entering the Atomic Age, with the threat of nuclear annihilation counterbalanced by the promise of unlimited energy "too cheap to meter". In the bright light of the bomb, few people foresaw that the world of the late 20th century would be defined by another product of wartime research, the electronic digital computer. When it first appeared, one expert in the field estimated that a half-dozen of the big, expensive machines would satisfy the nation's computing needs. The nation now depends in its daily life on hundreds of millions of tiny, cheap computers, most of them embedded within large information and communications systems or beneath the surface of devices ranging from airplanes to toasters. Computers we can see and use fill our offices, schools, and homes. They have become a commodity, a common appliance. We live in the World of the Computer, with unlimited information literally at our fingertips, though not yet too cheap to meter.
In the process, computers have come to embody a computational mode of thinking that has shaped not only the solution of problems but their very conceptualization. Increasing use of the computer in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the arts has led to new, often interdisciplinary approaches to these subjects. During the past two decades in particular, the capacity to build interactive models simulating our understanding of the workings of stars, molecules, economies, environments, living systems, and even the human mind has fundamentally changed the way we think about the world and ourselves. The instant availability of immense amounts of information -- sound and pictures, as well as text -- from around the world is now reshaping our sense of what we can know and how we go about finding it out.
There was nothing inevitable about the development of the computer over the past half-century, either as a device or a way of thinking. Its evolution has been contingent on scientific and technological innovation, on economic and political circumstances, and, perhaps most importantly, on entrepreneurial matching of technical possibilities with potential markets. The seminar will examine a variety of historical sources, including early computers, to explore how the world of the computer acquired its present form.
FRS 114w satisfies the Writing Requirement at Princeton.
Information on Freshman Seminars