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Some Historical Remarks

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Book cover The Information Society: Evolving Landscapes

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Abstract

THE computer is a tool that enables the control of spatial and temporal dimensions of some families of events. The first major applications of computer science, notably military, have relied on this essential quality. Where does this capacity of the computer come from? The objective of this paper is to answer this question by bringing to the fore the relations between computer science and the world of automatism. Effectively, the computer integrates two distinct traditions relating to the control of time and space: regulation automatism and programming. This synthesis is probably one of the origins of the power of the computer.

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Sources

  1. Augarten, S. [ 1984 ], Bit by Bit. An Illustrated History of Computer, Ticknor and Fields, New York.

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Authors
  1. Philippe Breton
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut d’Informatique, Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, Namur, Belgium

    Jacques Berleur

  2. Faculty of Library and Information Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Andrew Clement

  3. British Computer Society, London, UK

    Richard Sizer

  4. London Business School, London, UK

    Diane Whitehouse

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© 1990 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Breton, P. (1990). Some Historical Remarks. In: Berleur, J., Clement, A., Sizer, R., Whitehouse, D. (eds) The Information Society: Evolving Landscapes. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4328-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4328-9_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-97453-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-4328-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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