Shannon, Claude E. [Elwood]

Computers and Automation - Progress and Promise in the Twentieth Century [offprint]

[Houston, Texas]: Rice University circa October 12, 1962. 201-211, [1-blank] pages. 9 1/8 x 6 1/8 inches. Publisher's printed blue wrappers, stapled. Upper right corners bumped with pages tips bent. Page 211 has a nice watermark: "Warren's olde style." Staples rusty, lightly worn, read. Very Good. Wraps. [28679]


Shannon gave this lecture in Hamman Hall, Rice University, Texas, on October 12, 1962. He breaks down humanity’s technological progress in exploiting its environment into three main streams of activity: 1) material resources - wood for shelter, agriculture for food, metals for tools; leading to great industries including extraction, manufacturing, and transportation. 2) energy resources - fire for heat, harnessing wind and water, the steam engine, electric power engineering, and the first industrial revolution. 3) the collection, transmission, and processing of information - the spoken word, writing, the printed book followed in the nineteenth century by the explosive growth in communication and processing of information.

Shannon comments on many items but focuses on the third area. He comments on the transistor ("a genuine scientific breakthrough of absolutely first-rate importance"); developments in large-scale computing which created "a wild orgy of experimental programming”; and an explosion of interest in music, chess, medical diagnosis as the tools became better understood.

"Man, Science Learning and Education,” Supplement 2 to Vol. XLIX, Rice University Studies, Rice Univ., 1963, pp. 201-211 (edited by S. W. Higginbotham) first published this article, offered here in the offprint form.

PROVENANCE: The personal files of Claude E. Shannon (unmarked). The only example in Shannon's files.

REFERENCES:
Sloane and Wyner, "Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers," #120

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