Gottfried Leibniz and the origins of computational theory

The miniaturization of technology is slowly turning from promise into reality. The success of this trend has spawned perceptual difficulties for consumers: a few years ago it was still possible to impress a datacentre manager with the size and robustness of a Sun workstation. Today, an iPOD has more RAM, processor power and hard disk space than a server used to have in the year 2000.

Interaction with computers has pre-occupied many a psychologist since the earliest musings on the subject by the non-psychologist Alan Turing. Indeed, the very notion of a Turing test, and the philosophical controversies that arose in its aftermath, define a large portion of the discussion of what a successful interaction with a computer should be. The Turing test set standards that were a tad high: not being able to distinguish your computer from the man in the street or your friendly neighbourhood pharmacist is not what every user wants from their computer...

In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. His initial proposal, presented the year before, was “that a global hypertext space be created in which any network-accessible information could be referred to by a single ‘Universal Document Identifier’”.

John von Neumann is a name to be conjured with. A US mathematician of Hungarian extraction, he is the closest modern mathematics and engineering has had to a magician. His influence stretched from theoretical biology to logic and proof theory; it extended to most of mathematics, physics and economics. He is also one of the founding fathers of modern computer science where his work spanned automata theory as well as the beginnings of computer architecture.

Steven Levy discovered the peculiar charms of the hacker subculture on an assignment for Rolling Stone magazine in the early 80s. As a journalist, his mission was to chase the stereotype and uncover what he believed to be the "overweight, unfriendly and antisocial" world of computer hackers.

There was a time when the ability to write applications in Smalltalk was considered an accolade. Pre-2000, Smalltalk programmers were not only hired for their ability to write programs in a very popular programming language, but they were also reputed to possess a better-honed ability to design large applications using pure OO design principles.

In the language of hackers a hack is “a quickly written short piece of code that makes something work” or "a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement", and a hacker is a person “who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.”

The cultures that produced modern technology are like history itself: largely dead or transmuted beyond recognition. There are those among us who believe modern technology has no need of institutions, states, governments, or the tenuous support of organised religion.

It is not often that a 2100 year-old device becomes news again more than 100 years after it's first discovery at the bottom of the Aegean Sea. This is what happened when a consortium of computer companies, archaeological institutions and archaeo-astronomers released a statement that a major re-evaluation of the Antikythera device was about to be completed.