The real origins of cyberspace
For an interesting and somewhat rigorous take on the intellectual (meaning: real) origins of the computer and cyberspace as opposed to a collection of ephemera and artifacts that may have something to with this topic, see Martin Davis's Engines of Logic: Mathematicans and the Origins of the Computer. (Full disclosure: Martin Davis is my father.) Within the Jeremy Norman Origins of Cyberspace collection (see my previous blog entry) there are reprints of scholarly articles that don't apparently have much to do with computers or cyberspace. For example, Lot # 86 in the auction is a reprint of a 1936 article from the Journal of Symbolic Logic by Princeton logician Alonzo Church with an estimate of $5000 - $7000. This article is in the auction because the circuits inside computers embody the insights of generations of logicians including Church, as my father explains in his book (incidentally, my father was a PhD student of Alonzo Church).
Posted by Harold Davis at February 21, 2005 11:59 AM
