ジャンル: IT
英語難易度: ★☆☆
オススメ度: ★★★☆☆
今のコンピュータの元となる原型がこの世に現れてからまだ100年も経ってませんが、メインフレームやPC、スマホ、IoTなど、その関連世界の進化の度合いは目まぐるしく、その範囲も多岐に渡っています。 ベースとなる知識をキチンと系統立てて理解したいと常々思っていた折に手にしたものです。 コンパクトにまとまっていますが、いわゆる教科書的な本ですので面白味には欠けますね。 他のIT関連の本を読む前の事前準備の読み物としては、まあ良かったかなと感じました。
刊行年が少し古く、ドローン制御やメタなどのワードはもちろん出てきません。この辺りは常にアップデートが必要ですね。
(2012年発刊)
メモポイント
⚫︎ コンピュータって、ザックリと呼んでいるけど、ある一つの装置が進化した等という単純な話ではなく、様々に分かれていた技術がそれぞれに進化し収斂して出来上がったもの。
computing represents a convergence of many different streams of techniques, devices, and machines, each coming from its own separate historical avenue of development.
⚫︎ IBMの始まりは… 人工知能ワトソンのネーミングの由来。ホームズとは関係ない!
Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company to market his inventions; it was later combined with other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R), and in 1924, the new head of C-T-R, Thomas Watson, changed the name to the International Business Machines Corporation, today’s IBM.
⚫︎ ジャカード織で有名なジャカードも織り物のパターンをカードで制御していた。これにヒントを得たのであろう、ホレリスもパンチカードを彼の計算マシンに利用した。制御用ではなくデータの保存、記録用として。
この穴あきカード、ピコピコ光るコンピュータのリールから打ち出される穴あきテープのイメージがあります。昔のチープなSF映画に出てくるコンピュータってみんなこんなのですよね。「ウルトラマン」のフジ隊員がこれを読んで「キャップ、怪獣が鎌倉湾沖に！」なんて。昔のコンピュータは本当にユーザー・アンフレンドリーでした。
Jacquard used cards for control, whereas Hollerith used them for storage of data.
⚫︎ コンピュータが台頭する前は人間自身が計算装置だった。そして、コンピュータの語源は計算を担当する人間の呼称だったのだ。(主に女性)
Bush’s differential analyzer was copied and heavily used to compute firing tables used in the field. Human computers, mostly women, also produced these tables.
⚫︎ 記念すべきURLとhttp 、HTMLの誕生
Doug Engelbart had developed a system that used such texts, the selection of which used his invention, the mouse. Hypertext had also been promoted by Ted Nelson, a neighbor of Stewart Brand in northern California and author of the self-published manifesto Computer Lib. As he saw the growing amounts of data on the Internet, Berners-Lee explored a way of porting those concepts to the online world. His invention had three basic components. The first was a uniform resource locator (URL), which took a computer to any location on the Internet—across the globe, down the hall, or even on one’s own hard drive—with equal facility—a “flat” access device. The second was a protocol, called hypertext transfer protocol (http), which rode on top of the Internet protocols and facilitated the exchange of files from a variety of sources, regardless of the machines they were residing on. The third was a simple hypertext markup language (HTML), a subset of a formatting language already in use on IBM mainframes. That HTML was simple to learn made it easy for novices to build Web pages. With administrative and technical support from Robert Cailliau, the system was working on machines at CERN on Christmas Day 1990, and the following year it began to spread around the globe.
⚫︎ そしてインターネット見るのに欠かせないブラウザーの始まり。 モザイクやらネットスケープやら、懐かしい。
Berners-Lee also wrote a program, called a browser, that users installed on their computer to decode and properly display the information transmitted over the Web (the term may have come from Apple’s Hypercard). In 1992, as the Web began spreading across university and government laboratories in the United States, a group at an NSF-sponsored supercomputer center in Illinois took the browser concept further, adding rich graphics capabilities and integrating it seamlessly with the mouse and with icons. That browser was called Mosaic; its creators later moved to Silicon Valley and founded a company, Netscape, to market a similar commercial version of it. Microsoft later would license another descendant of Mosaic for its own browser, Internet Explorer. One significant feature of Netscape’s browser that was not present in others was a way to transmit information, especially credit card numbers, securely by encrypting the data stream. The method, called Secure Socket Layer, opened up the Internet to commercial transactions.
この系統の話が好きな方にオススメなのは、IBM人工知能ワトソンの話の「Final Jeopardy 」(28冊目)、それからAmazon Kindle話の「Burning the Page」(25冊目), PC勃興期の時代の空気も読みたい方は「iCon - Steve Jobs」(111冊目)などなど
