The freshman assembly during orientation week
will be your first introduction to the intellectual life of
our community. This event shares the structure of many of
the classes you will take at Princeton: a lecture followed
by small discussion groups.
On Sunday, Sept. 7, Brian Kernighan, professor of computer
science, will address the Class of 2007. His talk is entitled
"D is for Digital, and Why it Matters." In preparation for
the evening's lecture and discussion, Professor Kernighan
would like you to read a series of articles. What follows
is his introduction to the lecture and readings, as well as
links to the readings themselves. |
| "D is for Digital, and Why
it Matters"
--Brian Kernighan, professor of computer science, Princeton
University
Computers, computing, and many things enabled by them are
all around us. Some of this is highly visible, like personal
computers and the Internet; much is invisible, like the microprocessors
in cars and appliances and gadgets, or the programs that fly
our planes and keep our telephones and power systems and medical
equipment working, or the myriad systems that quietly collect
and share personal data about us. Increasingly, they are all
connected.
How did we get to this point? And where might we be going?
Prediction is a risky business at best, but there is something
to be learned from the predictions of the past, even if only
that most of them miss the mark. You might find it interesting
to read the four articles cited below, all of which come from
The Atlantic Monthly (which has had a good track record of
predicting which articles are worth publishing, and which
generously makes these articles available on the Web).
The classic 1945 article "As
We May Think" by Vannevar Bush contains a remarkable number
of good ideas about what the future might hold, though he
completely missed the power of the computer and the universality
of digital representation, processing and communications.
The ideas in this article, though certainly not the technology,
are sometimes credited with inspiring the personal computer
and the Internet.
Martin Greenberger's 1964 article "The
Computers of Tomorrow" is often coupled with Bush's. Twenty
years after, the picture is much more recognizable, though
today Greenberger's "information utility" has certainly not
taken the form he anticipated.
In 1982, at the dawn of the personal computer era, James
Fallows discovered word processing. The world described in
"Living
with a Computer" is distantly familiar, but a reader from
1964 would be amazed at how cheap computers were, while today's
reader is struck by how weak and expensive his computer was.
Finally, Charles Mann wrote "The
Heavenly Jukebox" about Napster, which in 2000 was sweeping
campuses everywhere. Napster came and went in barely three
years, but its descendants thrive today, especially on university
campuses, causing great angst in the "content industry," considerable
pain to university administrators, and much pleasure for students,
except perhaps to those few who were sued last spring. |
