The information revolution: The new age,How the information revolution began and The impact of microchips.

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The new age

I belong to the 1960s generation. At school in the 1950s, we were excited by the idea of being at the threshold of the atomic age and the space age. Favourite reading was Dan Dare, pilot of the future. Looking back now from the perspective of the 1990s, these ideas, and our reading material, seem rather quaint. Neither atomic energy nor space travel have had much of an impact on the world, except as deterrents to war.

What has had an enormous impact on the world since the 1950s is information processing. Most of the things we do have been revolutionized in one way or another by the new information processing technology. To give just a few examples:

• The music we listen to is often processed using modern computer-based equipment and stored in the form of information on magnetic tape or compact disc.

• The pictures we look at are shot with cameras incorpo­ rating information processing features which measure light and distances and then make automatic adjust­ ments of lens aperture and focusing.

• The newspapers we read are produced from information keyed in, stored, and processed in electronic form.

Most aspects of our economy, from the music industry, TV and other parts of the leisure industry to manufacturing, banking, retailing, and defence, are now totally dependent upon modern information processing.

The age we live in turns out to be not the atomic age, nor the space age, but the information age.

How the information revolution began

Why did the atomic age and the space age fail to material­ ize? If we look back to other ages in man's history, such as the stone age and the iron age, we see that they were based on a low-cost and widely available technology: shaped flints (called flint chips) in the case of the stone age, and iron smelting in the case of the iron age. Atomic devices and space vehicles are neither low cost nor widely available, and so have not revolutionized our lives.

What no one foresaw in the 1950s was the invention, at the start of the 1960s, of the silicon chip. This device, which quickly became a low-cost mass-produced commodity, is able to process large amounts of information at high speeds. Besides being cheap and powerful, it is also very small about the size of a fingernail. In the 1950s, the equivalent amount of processing power would have required a room­ sized computer with costs running into six figures. To emphasize their smallness, silicon chips are also called 'microchips'. (This is a better name, since substances other than silicon can now be used to produce chips.)

Today, if you buy a camera, or a washing machine, or a TV, or a car, or indeed one of a host of other manufac­tured products, the chances are that it is controlled by a microchip. Microchips inside computers now govern infor­mation processing in commercial and governmental organ­izations. There are few offices, factories, banks, or other institutions that do not depend upon these ubiquitous devices.

The impact of microchips

Flint chips revolutionized human societies and economies in the stone age because they formed the basis of a range of tools which extended the power of men's hands. This made people much more productive. The microchips which are revolutionizing our society and economy are extending the powers of men's brains.

I've mentioned modern cameras as an example of the impact of modern information processing. Taking snapshots with 1950s-vintage cameras required the use of light meters,

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Figure 1.1 A microchip

range finders, and fiddling with lens settings; with a modern microchip-controlled camera, in contrast, you just point and shoot. This means that:

• You have less to learn about the technicalities of taking photographs.

• Point-and -shoot is quick and easy compared to tra­ditional methods with light meters and range finders.

• The quality will be higher, as human error in setting the aperture and focusing is eliminated.

• Freed of the technicalities , you can concentrate your attention on the composition of the picture.

The same kinds of advantages apply to other equipment that incorporates the information processing power of microchips. Nowhere is the result more plainly seen than in the office. Tasks which a few decades ago required armies of office workers can now be done automatically by com­puters under the control of a few people. This has not resulted in massive unemployment, any more than flint chips brought unemployment to the stone age. What happened then was that output increased , so that people had more food , clothing, and other necessities of life. Likewise today , the main itnpact of the microchip has been the production of far more information by the same number of workers.

What happened in factories in the past with the introduc­tion of automation- i .e. enormous productivity increases- is now happening in the office and other places where information is generated.

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