|
They decided to call the program , for Visible Calculator. . . .
When it was launched in December 1979, VisiCalc was an overnight success. Not only was the program a breakthrough as a financial tool but its users experienced
for the first time the psychological freedom of having a machine of one's own, on one's desk, instead of having to accept the often mediocre take-it-or-leave-it
services of a computer center. |
|
| |
Martin Campbell-Kelley and William Aspray,
Computer:
A History of the Information Machine, p.251 | |
We'll be able to what's happening. Not only will we have numbers, but we'll be able
to the dynamics for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Using the projection capability, you can immediately the impact on
earnings or the portfolio. We'll be able to the business through the terminal.
With the data-base environment, there is one information system for all to .
Tasks become more comprehensive. You can the whole, not just the part. People will need a broader skill base to take more of a helicopter
.
The new technology makes you at the
whole. Tasks become more comprehensive as a result. You need to know where to for what you need and how to get it. You need to
patterns in relation to the whole.
Now that I can the total
functioning of the office, I feel more ownership towards all of the units, not just my own. . . . I am not just a record keeper, but I can really use my brain. |
|
| |
Managers and workers interviewed by Shoshana Zuboff in her
The
Age of the Smart Machine, pp. 163, 202, 169, 157 |
|
Once were included, the spreadsheet was a nearly perfect
expression of what you could do with a computer that you could not do without it; it combined the computer's specialty, memory and calculating power, with the
most powerful and most difficult to replicate power of the human mind, the ability to recognize and integrate patterns. |
|
| |
Gene I. Rochlin,
Trapped
in the Net, p. 28 | |
Foucault uses the term "panopticon"
to designate the control mechanism in prisons by which a guard, stationed in a central tower, could observe the inmates, arranged in cells around the tower with
windows facing in toward the tower, without himself being seen by them. Panopticon, literally "" denotes a form of power
which attempts to orient the prisoners toward the authority system of the prison as a step in their reformation or normalization. For the process of reform,
the panopticon is a part of a broader set of mechanisms which included a minutely regulated schedule, a file-keeping system on each prisoner, and so forth. . .
. The key to the mechanism of discipline is the continuous, systematic, unobserved surveillance of a population. . . .
Databases,
I argue, operate as a super-panopticon. Like the prison, databases work continuously, systematically and surreptiously, accumulating information about
individuals and composing it into profiles. |
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| |
Mark Poster,
The
Second Media Age, pp. 67, 69 | |
The Vision Thing
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