What does it mean to live in an IT-ruled society?
How can tensions between centralization and decentralized forms of authority and control be reconciled? What organizational forms can facilitate economic growth, maintain sustainable environments, and provide abundant opportunities for creative participation and productivity?
How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.1: Data Technology and Money
Data communication systems moved quickly from military experimentation to commercial exploitation as banks, news agencies, and other corporate actors who were moving branches and factories offshore utilized these new technologies.
How IT Came to Rule the World, Digital Monetarism
While the idea of a regime is meant to be fluid, digital monetarism can be given a start date: On August 15, 1971, President Nixon shocked with world with his surprise television announcement that he was “closing the gold window” and no longer honoring the redemption of dollars for gold.
how IT came to rule the world, 1.8: Bell Labs and the Transistor
Three licensees in particular, Motorola, Texas Instruments and Fairchild took advantage of AT&T’s transistor technology.
How IT Came to Rule the World, 1.7
The problems encountered in reconciling these different data transmission systems operating in different networks led to the Internetting Project and the development of a new data communications protocol that would link different computers operating on different computer networks.
How IT Came to Rule the World, 1.6
Minuteman missiles utilized transistors developed by Bell Labs and then commercialized by Western start-ups who created the small silicon-based computing “chips” for their guidance systems. Combined with NASA’s Gemini and Apollo projects, the first major markets were created for integrated circuits or ICs, a crucial innovation for computing.
How IT Came to Rule the World, 1.5: ARPA and NASA
After the USSR shocked the world in 1956 with its Sputnik satellite, the US took two major actions that would converge later in the modern Internet as well as a wide range of other technologies, including the microprocessor and the personal computer.
How IT Came to Rule the World, 1.4: SAGE and Early Electronic Computing
The SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system conceived at MIT and built at IBM’s Poughkeepsie, New York facilities helped transform the computer from a bulky, slow, vacuum-tube switched numerical processor into a generalized, software-driven, transistor-enabled, media-enhanced computer with an accompanying communications system able to send digital data over telephone lines.
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About Me
Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.
You can reach me at:
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
About me
Writings by Category
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