Image taken from Tacita Dean - Disappearance at Sea
In September 1991 Scientific American had a special issue focussing on ‘Communications, Computers and Networks’. An impressive array of articles were collected in this issue, including Mark Weiser’s ‘The Computer for the 21st Century‘, which is often referred to as the foundational article for ‘Ubiquitous Computing‘. An article later in the issue, simply entitled ‘Networks’ by Vint Cerf, expertly charted the issues that were to arise in the exponential growth of the internet. Also in the special issue was an article by Alan Kay about ‘Computers, Networks and Education’, expounding the ideals he set forth in his proposal of the ‘dynabook‘ to think about how technologies can be allies not hindrances in education. In the introduction to this special issue of Scientific American, Michael L. Dertouzos suggests that:
“the authors in this issue share a hopeful vision of a future built on information infrastructure that will enrich our lives by reliving us of mundane tasks, by improving the ways we live, learn and work and by unlocking new personal and social freedoms”.
