Toward the end of the second millennium of the Christian Era several events of historical significance have transformed the social landscape of human life.

A technological revolution, centered around information technologies, is reshaping, at accelerated pace, the material basis of society.

Economies throughout the world have become globally interdependent, introducing a new form of relationship between economy, state and society.

Capitalism itself has undergone a process of profound restructuring, characterized by greater flexibility in management.

Decentralization and networking of firms both internally and in their relationships to other firms.

Considerable empowering of capital vis-à-vis labor, with the concomitant decline of influence of the labor movement.

Increasing individualization and diversification of working relationships.

As a consequence of the general overhauling of the capitalist system, still under way, we have witnessed the global integration of financial markets.

The rise of the Asian Pacific as the new dominant, global manufacturing center.

The arduous economic unification of Europe

The emergence of a North American regional economy.

Simultaneously, criminal activities and Mafia-like organizations around the world have also become global and informational.

Providing the means for stimulation of mental hyperactivity and forbidden desire.

Along with any form of illicit trade demanded by our societies.

From sophisticated weaponry to human flesh.

Social changes are as dramatic as technological and economic processes of transformation.

Patriarchalism has come under attack, and has been shaken in a number of societies.

Thus, gender relationships have become, in much of the world, a contested domain, rather than a sphere of cultural reproduction.

Political systems are engulfed in a structural crisis of legitimacy.

Periodically wrecked by scandals.

Essentially dependent on media coverage and personalized leadership

And increasingly isolated from the citizenry.

Religious fundamentalism, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, and even Buddhist (in what seems to be a contradiction in terms).

Is probably the most formidable force of personal security and collective mobilization in these troubled years.

In a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images.

The search for identity, collective or individual, ascribed or constructed, becomes the fundamental source of social meaning.

Technology, Society, and Historical Change

In the 1970s a new technological paradigm, organized around information technology, came to be constituted, mainly in the United States.

That the constitution of the paradigm took place in the United States.

And to some extent in California.

And in the 1970s.

Probably had considerable consequences for the forms and evolution of new information technologies.

For instance, in spite of the decisive role of military funding and markets in fostering early stages of the electronics industry during the 1940s-1960s.

The technological blossoming that took place in the early 1970s can be somehow related to the culture of freedom.

Individual innovation, and entrepreneurialism that grew out from the 1960s culture of American campuses.

As is known, the Internet originated in a daring scheme imagined in the 1960s .

By the technological warriors of US Defense Department Advanced Research Projects Agency (the mythical DARPA).

To prevent a Soviet takeover or destruction of American communications in case of nuclear war.

The outcome was a network architecture that, as its inventors wanted, cannot be controlled from any center.

And is made up of thousands of autonomous computer networks that have innumerable ways to link up, going around electronic barriers.

Ultimately ARPANET, the network set up by the US Defense Department.

Became the foundation of a global, horizontal communication network of thousands of computer networks.

Admittedly for a computer literate elite of about 20 million users in the mid-1990s, but growing exponentially.

If society does not determine technology, it can, mainly through the state, suffocate is development.

Or alternatively, again mainly by state intervention, it can embark on an accelerated process of technological modernization.

Able to change the fate of economies, military power, and social well being in a few years.

Around 1400, when the European Renaissance was planting the intellectual seeds of technological change.

That would dominate the world three centuries later.

China was the most advanced technological civilization in the world.

Key inventions had developed in China centuries earlier.

Even a millennium and a half earlier.

As in the case of blast furnaces that allowed the casting of iron in China by 200BC.

Also, Su Sung introduced the water clock in AD1086.

Surpassing the accuracy of measurement of European mechanical clocks of the same date.

The iron plow was introduced in the sixth century, and adapted to wet-field rice cultivation two centuries later.

In textiles, the spinning wheel appeared at the same time as in the West.

By the thirteenth century.

But advanced much faster in China because there was an old-established tradition of sophisticated weaving equipment.

Draw looms to weave silk were used in Han times.

The adoption of water-power was parallel to Europe.

By the eighth century the Chinese were using hydraulic trip hammers.

And in 1280 there was wide diffusion of the vertical water wheel.

Ocean travel was easier for the Chinese at an earlier date than for European vessels.

They invented the compass around AD960.

And their junks were the most advanced ships in the world by the end of the fourteenth century, enabling long sea trips.

In military matters, the Chinese, besides inventing powder, developed a chemical industry that was able to provide powerful explosives.

The crossbow and the trebuchet were used by Chinese armies centuries ahead of Europe.

In medicine, techniques such as acupuncture were yielding extraordinary results that only recently have been universally acknowledged.

And of course, the first information processing revolution was Chinese.

Paper and printing were Chinese inventions.

Paper was introduced in China 1,000 years earlier than in the West.

And printing probably began in the late seventh century.

"China came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."

That it did not, changed the history of the world.

Historically, Japan went, even deeper than China, through a period of historical isolation.

Under the Tokugawa Shogunate (established in 1603), between 1636 and 1853.

Precisely during the critical period of formation of an industrial system in the western hemisphere.

Thus, while at the turn of the seventeenth century Japanese merchants were trading throughout East and Southeast Asia.

Using modern vessels of up to 700 tons.

The construction of ships above 50 tons was prohibited in 1635.

And all Japanese ports, except Nagasaki, were closed to foreigners.

While trade was restricted to China, Korea, and Holland.

Technological isolation was not total during these two centuries.

Endogenous innovation did allow Japan to proceed with incremental change at a faster pace than China.

As soon as the 1868 Ishin Meiji (Meiji Restoration) created the political conditions for a decisive state-led modernization.

Japan progressed in advanced technology by leaps and bounds in a very short time span.

Just as one significant illustration, because of its current strategic importance.

Let us briefly recall the extraordinary development of electrical engineering and communication applications in Japan in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, the first independent department of electrical engineering in the world was established in 1873.

In the newly founded Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo.

Under the leadership of its Dean, Henry Dyer, a Scottish mechanical engineer.

Between 1887 and 1892, a leading academic in electrical engineering, British professor William Ayrton, was invited to teach at the College.

Being instrumental in disseminating knowledge to the new generation of Japanese engineers.

So that by the end of the century the Telegraph Bureau was able to replace foreigners in all its technical departments.

Technology transfer from the West was sought after through a variety of mechanisms.

In 1872, the Machine Shop of the Telegraph Bureau sent a Japanese clockmaker, Tanaka Seisuke, to the International Machines exhibition in Vienna.

To obtain information of the machines.

About ten years later, all the Bureau's machines were made in Japan.

Based on this technology, Tanaka Daikichi founded in 1882 an electrical factory.

Shibaura Works.

After its acquisition by Mitsui, went on to become Toshiba.

Engineers were sent to Europe and to America.

And Western Electric was permitted to produce and sell in Japan in 1899, in a joint venture with Japanese industrialists.

The name of the company was NEC.

On such a technological basis Japan went full speed into the electrical and communications age before 1914.

By 1914 total power production had reached 1,555,000 kw/hour.

And 3,000 telephone offices were relaying a billion messages a year.

It is indeed symbolic that Commodore Perry's gift to the Shogun in 1857 was a set of American telegraphs, until then never seen in Japan.

The first telegraph line was laid in 1869, and ten years later Japan was connected to the whole world through a transcontinental information network.

Via Siberia.

Operated by the Great Northern Telegraph Co.

Jointly managed by western and Japanese engineers and transmitting in both English and Japanese.

The story of how Japan became a major world player in information technology industries in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Under the strategic guidance of the state.

Is now general public knowledge.

Japanese technological development since the 1960s did not happen in an historical vacuum.

But was rooted in a decades-old tradition of engineering excellence.

What must be retained for the understanding of the relationship between technology and society, is that the role of the state

By either stalling, unleashing, or leading technological innovation

Is a decisive factor in the overall process.

As it expresses and organizes the social and cultural forces that dominate in a given space and time.

To a large extent, technology expresses the ability of a society to propel itself into technological mastery through the institutions of society.

Including the state.

Informationalism, Industrialism, Capitalism, Statism:

Modes of Development and Modes of Production

The information technology revolution has been instrumental in allowing the implementation of a fundamental process of restructuring of the capitalist system.

From the 1980s onwards.

New information technologies are not simply tools to be applied, but processes to be developed.

Users and doers may become the same.

Thus users can take control of technology, as in the case of Internet.

For the first time in history, the human mind is a direct productive force, not just a decisive element of the production system.

Thus, computers, communication systems, and genetic decoding and programming are all amplifiers and extensions of the human mind.

New information technologies have spread throughout the globe with lightning speed in less than two decades.

Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s.

Displaying a logic that I propose as characteristic of the technological revolution.

The immediate application to its own development of technologies it generates, connecting the world through information technology.

Lessons from the Industrial Revolution

The key lesson to be retained is that technological innovation is not an isolated instance.

It reflects a given state of knowledge.

A particular institutional and industrial environment.

A certain availability of skills to define a technical problem and to solve it.

An economic mentality to make such application cost-efficient.

And a network of producers and users who can communicate their experiences cumulatively.

Learning by using and by doing.

Elite's learn by doing, thereby modifying the applications of technology, while most people learn by using.

Thus remaining within the constraints of the packaging of technology.

The Historical Sequence of the Information

Technology Revolution

Micro-engineering macro changes: electronics and

Information

The scientific and industrial predecessors of electronics-based information technologies can be found decades before the 1940s.

Not the least being the invention of the telephone by Bell in 1876, of the radio by Marconi in 1898, and of the vacuum tube by Deforest in 1896.

It was during the Second World War, and in its aftermath, that major technological breakthroughs in electronics took place.

The first programmable computer, and the transistor, source of microelectronics.

The true core of the Information Technology Revolution in the twentieth century.

The transistor, invented in 1947 at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

By three physicists, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley (recipients of the Nobel Prize for this discovery).

Made possible the processing of electric impulses at a fast pace in a binary mode of interruption and amplification.

Thus enabling the coding of logic and of communication with and between machines.

We call these processing devices semiconductors, and people commonly call them chips (actually now made of millions of transistors).

The first step in the transistor's diffusion was taken with the invention by Shockley of the junction transistor in 1951.

Yet its fabrication and widespread use required new manufacturing technologies and the use of an appropriate material.

The shift to silicon, literally building the new revolution on sand, was first accomplished by Texas Instruments (in Dallas) in 1954.

A move facilitated by the hiring in 1953 of Gordon Teal, another leading scientist from Bell Labs.

The invention of the planar process in 1959 by Fairchild Semiconductors (in Silicon Valley) opened up the possibility of the integration of miniaturized components with precision manufacturing.

Yet the decisive step in microelectronics had taken place in 1957.

The integrated circuit was co-invented by Jack Kilby, a Texas Instrument engineer and Bob Noyce, one of the founders of Fairchild.

But it was Noyce who first manufactured ICs by using the planar process.

It triggered a technological explosion.

In only three years, between 1959 and 1962, prices of semiconductors fell by 85%.

In the next ten years production increased by 20 times, 50% of which went to military uses.

As a point of historical comparison, it took 70 years (1780-1850) for the price of cotton cloth to drop by 85% in Britain during the Industrial Revolution.

Then, the movement accelerated during the 1960s as manufacturing technology improved.

Better chip design was helped by computers using faster and more powerful microelectronic devices.

The average price of an integrated circuit fell from $50 in 1962 to $1 in 1971.

The giant leap forward in the diffusion of microelectronics in all machines came in 1971.

The invention by Intel engineer, Ted Hoff (also in Silicon Valley), of the microprocessor.

The computer on a chip.

Thus, information processing power could be installed everywhere.

The race was on for ever-greater integration capacity of circuits on a single chip.

The technology of design and manufacturing constantly exceeding the limits of integration.

Previously thought to be physically impossible without abandoning the use of silicon material.

In the mid-1990s, technical evaluations still give 10 to 20 years of good life for silicon-based circuits.

Although research in alternative materials has been stepped up.

The level of integration has progressed by leaps and bounds in the last two decades.

As is known, the power of chips can be evaluated by a combination of three characteristics.

Their integration capacity, indicated by the smallest line width in the chip measured in microns (1 micron= 1 millionth of an inch).

Their memory capacity, measured in bits, thousands (k) and millions (megabits).

The speed of the microprocessor measured in megahertz.

Thus, the first 1971 processor was laid in lines of about 6.5 microns.

In 1980 it reached 4 microns.

In 1987 1 micron.

In 1995, Intel's Pentium chip featured a size in the 0.35 micron range.

Projections were for reaching 0.25 micron in 1999.

Thus, where in 1971 2,300 transistors were placed on a chip the size of a thumbtack, in 1993 there were 35 million transistors.

Combined with dramatic developments in parallel processing using multiple microprocessors.

Including, in the future, linking multiple microprocessors in a single chip.

It appears that the power of microelectronics is still being unleashed.

Relentlessly increasing computing capacity.

Greater miniaturization.

Further specialization.

And the decreasing price of increasingly powerful chips made it possible to place them in every machine in our everyday life.

From dishwashers and microwave ovens to automobiles, whose electronics, in the 1990s standard models, was more valuable than their steel.

Computers were also conceived from the mother of all technologies that was the Second World War.

But they were only born in 1946 in Philadelphia, if we except the war-related tools of the 1943 British Colossus applied to deciphering enemy codes.

And the German Z-3 reportedly produced in 1941 to help aircraft calculations.

U.S. Army sponsorship, took place at the University of Pennsylvania.

Where Mauchly and Eckert produced in 1946 the first general purpose computer.

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator).

Historians will recall that the first electronic computer weighed 30 tons.

Was built on metal modules nine feet tall.

Had 70,000 resistors and 18,000 vacuum tubes.

And occupied the area of a gymnasium.

When it was turned on, its electricity consumption was so high that Philadelphia's lighting twinkled.

In 1958, when Sperry Rand introduced a second-generation computer mainframe machine, IBM immediately followed up with its 7090 model.

But it was only in 1964 that IBM, with its 360/370 mainframe computer, came to dominate the computer industry.

Populated by new (Control Data, Digital), and old (Sperry, Honeywell, Burroughs, NCR) business machines companies.

Microelectronics changed all this, inducing a "revolution within the revolution."

The advent of the microprocessor in 1971, with the capacity to put a computer on a chip, turned the electronics world, and indeed the world itself, upside down.

In 1975, Ed Roberts, an engineer who had created a small calculator company MITS, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, built a computing box with the improbable name of Altair.

A character in the Star Trek TV series that was the object of admiration of the inventor's young daughter.

It was the basis for the design of Apple I, then of Apple II.

The first commercially successful microcomputer.

Realized in the garage of their parents' home by two young school drop-outs, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley.

A truly extraordinary saga that has by now become the founding legend of the Information Age.

Launched in 1976, with three partners and $91,000 capital, Apple Computers had by 1982 reached $583 million in sales.

Ushering in the age of diffusion of computer power.

IBM reacted quickly.

In 1981 it introduced its own version of the microcomputer, with a brilliant name.

The Personal Computer (PC).

That became in fact the generic name for microcomputers.

But because it was not based on IBM's proprietary technology, but on technology developed for IBM by other sources, it became vulnerable to cloning.

Which was soon practiced on a massive scale, particularly in Asia.

Yet while this fact eventually doomed IBM's business dominance in PCs, it also spread the use of IBM clones throughout the world.

Diffusing a common standard, in spite of the superiority of Apple machines.

Apple's Macintosh, launched in 1984, was the first step towards user-friendly computing.

With the introduction of icon-based, user interface technology, originally developed by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

A fundamental condition for the diffusion of microcomputers was fulfilled with the development of new software adapted to their operation.

PC software also emerged in the mid-1970s out of the enthusiasm generated by Altair

Two young Harvard drop-outs, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, adapted BASIC for operating the Altair machine in 1976.

Having realized its potential, they went on to found Microsoft.

First in Albuquerque, two years later moving to Seattle, home of Bill Gates' parents.

Today's software giant.

That parlayed dominance in operating system software into dominance in software for the exponentially growing microcomputer market as a whole.

In the last 15 years, increasing chip power has resulted in a dramatic enhancement of microcomputing power.

Thus shrinking the function of larger computers.

By the early 1990s, single-chip microcomputers had the processing power of IBM only five years earlier.

Networked microprocessor-based systems.

Composed of smaller desktop machines (clients).

Served by more powerful, dedicated machines (servers).

May eventually supplant more specialized information-processing computers.

Such as traditional mainframes and supercomputers.

Indeed, to advances in microelectronics and software we have to add major leaps forward in networking capabilities.

Since the mid-1980s. microcomputers cannot be conceived of an isolation.

They perform in networks, with increasing mobility, on the basis of portable computers.

This extraordinary versatility, and the capacity to add memory and processing capacity by sharing computing power in an electronic network

Decisively shifted the computer age in the 1990s from centralized data storage and processing to networked, interactive computer power sharing.

Not only the whole technological system changed, but its social and organizational interactions as well.

Thus, the average cost of processing information fell from around $75 per million operations in 1960 to less than one-hundredth of a cent in 1990.

Telecommunications have been revolutionized also by the combination of "node" technologies (electronic switches and routers).

And new linkages (transmission technologies).

The first industrially produced electronic switch, the ESS-l, was introduced by Bell Labs in 1969.

Major advances in optoelectronics (fiber optics and laser transmission).

And digital packet transmission technology dramatically broadened the capacity of transmission lines.

The Integrated Broadband Networks (IBN) envisioned in the 1990s could surpass substantially the 1970s proposals for an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN).

The carrying capacity of ISDN on copper wire was estimated at 144,000 bits.

The 1990s IBN on optic fiber, if and when they can be realized, though at a high price, could carry a quadrillion bits.

To measure the pace of change, let us recall that in 1956 the first transatlantic cable phone carried 50 compressed voice circuits.

In 1995, optical fibers could carry 85,000 such circuits.

This optoelectronics-based transmission capacity, together with advanced switching and routing architectures

Such as the Asynchronous Transmission Mode (ATM) and Transmission Control Protocol/Interconnection Protocol (TCP/IP).

Are the basis of the so-called 1990s Information Superhighway.

The 1970s technological divide

This technological system in which we are full immersed in the 1990s came together in the 1970s.

Thus, the microprocessor, the key device in spreading microelectronics, was invented 1971 and began to diffuse by the mid-1970s.

The microcomputer was invented in 1975.

The first successful commercial product, Apple II, was introduced in April 1977.

Around the same date that Microsoft started to produce operating systems for microcomputers.

The Xerox Alto, the matrix of many software technologies for 1990s personal computers, was developed at PARC labs in Palo Alto in 1973.

The first industrial electronic switch appeared in 1969.

Digital switching was developed in the mid -1970s and commercially diffused in 1977.

Optic fiber was first industrially produced by Corning Glass in the early 1970s.

Also by the mid-1970s, Sony started to produce VCR machines commercially.

On the basis of 1960s discoveries in America and England that never reached mass production.

And last, but not least, it was in 1969

That the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) set up a new, revolutionary electronic communication network.

That would grow during the 1970s to become the current Internet.

It was greatly helped by the invention of Cerf and Kahn in 1974 of TCP/IP.

The interconnection network protocol that ushered in "gateway" technology, allowing different types of networks to be connected.

The Information Technology Revolution, as a revolution, was born in the 1970s.

Technologies of life

The social dimension of the Information Technology Revolution seems bound to follow the law on the relationship between technology and society.

Proposed some time ago by Melvin Kranzberg.

"Kranzberg's First Law reads as follows: Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral."

It is indeed a force, probably more than ever under the current technological paradigm that penetrates the core of life and mind.

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, society and Culture, Vol 1:

The rise of the Network Society. Blackwell Publishers: New York

1996: 1-65.