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As in many other first along the road of technological progress, the stimulus which initiated and sustained the effort that produced the ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer)--the world's first electronic digital computer--was provided by the extraordinary demand of war

This Department had the responsibility for the design, development, procurement, storage, and issue of all combat materiel and munitions for the Army. In 1939 it was staffed by a relative handful of officers and career civilian employees.

One of the extraordinarily important tasks

Leinster made one of the first descriptions of a personal computer (called a "logic") in science fiction

Leinster envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and even commerce

Information runs rampant as every logic worldwide crunches away at problems too vast in scope for human minds to have attempted. Societal chaos quickly ensues, the situation became critical.

Grant’s wife Augusta noted at the time, “I am glad that I live in this age when every day — almost every hour — brings us some new inventions.”

Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting satellite launched by Russia in 1957, inspired the development of satellite networks positioned well above the earth. The first United States broadcast over Telstar 1 in 1962 featured clips from a baseball game in Chicago, a news conference by President John F. Kennedy and a concert from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. 

“We are not breathlessly smitten by the Internet, nor are we in any way underestimating its possibilities,” said Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, Church leader, in a 1997 speech. “We are just moving steadily, and we think wisely, to use it along with every other way we know to communicate with each other.” 

Impressive services

Only last week Google splashed out on Writely, a web-based word processor that requires no downloads or installation and just runs in a browser window.

They are just the tip of an iceberg

zero-cost distribution has turned sharing into an industry

We thought maybe we’d put together a few temporary, informal memos on network protocols, the rules by which computers exchange information

Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or asserting authority.

Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, I labeled the note a “Request for Comments.”

What are the limits of political protest in cyberspace, where the boundaries between public and private space are murky? How far can activists go without infringing on the rights of the people against whom they are protesting? As international reliance on computer technology increases, can anyone with a little technical know-how declare their own war?

'In cyberspace, you don't have clear public byways intersecting private spaces, so there is no place to camp out and play your First Amendment card. If you try to deny service to someone else, by whatever means you use, you could be in pretty big trouble.'' The FBI spokesperson said that the use of Floodnet could constitute a federal crime: It is illegal to intentionally block access to an Internet server. But the members of the collective argue that they are simply gathering at the gateway, not chaining themselves to the door.

From an unseen distance, Chipchase used his phone to pilot me through the unfamiliar chaos, allowing us to have what he calls a “just in time” moment. “Just in time” is a manufacturing concept that was popularized by the Japanese carmaker Toyota when, beginning in the late 1930s, it radically revamped its production system, virtually eliminating warehouses stocked with big loads of car parts and instead encouraging its assembly plants to order parts directly from the factory only as they were needed. The process became less centralized, more incremental. Car parts were manufactured swiftly and in small batches, which helped to cut waste, improve efficiency and more easily correct manufacturing defects. As Toyota became, in essence, lighter on its feet, the company’s productivity rose, and so did its profits. There are a growing number of economists who maintain that cellphones can restructure developing countries in a similar way. Cellphones, after all, have an economizing effect. My “just in time” meeting with Chipchase required little in the way of advance planning and was more efficient than the oft-imperfect practice of designating a specific time and a place to rendezvous. He didn’t have to leave his work until he knew I was in the vicinity. Knowing that he wasn’t waiting for me, I didn’t fret about the extra 15 minutes my taxi driver sat blaring his horn in Accra’s unpredictable traffic. And now, on foot, if I moved in the wrong direction, it could be quickly corrected. Using mobile phones, we were able to coordinate incrementally. “Do you see the footbridge?” Chipchase was saying over the phone. “No? O.K., do you see the giant green sign that says ‘Believe in God’? Yes? I’m down to the left of that.”

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries. As more and more countries abandon government-run telecom systems, offering cellular network licenses to the highest-bidding private investors and without the burden of navigating pre-established bureaucratic chains, new towers are going up at a furious pace. Unlike fixed-line phone networks, which are expensive to build and maintain and require customers to have both a permanent address and the ability to pay a monthly bill, or personal computers, which are not just costly but demand literacy as well, the cellphone is more egalitarian, at least to a point.