I will admit upfront that I struggle to understand or be invested in the workings of machines or the way they work. I am certainly grateful for the advances in technology, and I am interested to see how events led to the advancement of technology in the ways that they did, but the more specific details like the vacuum tubes generally tend to confuse me.

I think Professor O’Malley did a good job, however in explaining the situation of the Cold War and how it lead to the creation and expansion of the internet. One thing that made me interested at the start of the lecture was when Professor O’Malley mentioned how colleges grew during World War Two and the Cold War thanks to the GI Bill. It’s hard for me to conceive college not being important, but the government realized during the wars that the future would belong to the educated, and thus helped veterans get into college during that time, where the universities expanded.

It’s also interesting to see how computers went from merely tracking trajectories of missiles and such to becoming a more fluid way of translating and sending information between researchers. The subject of how information is relayed to people is one that we actually read up on before class in the essay As We May Think, by Vannevar Bush.

Vannevar Bush was seen as the second most important person during World War 2, being the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. He had to make sure that the right information and developments during the war from various researchers were going to the right people, a very important job, especially during such a troubled time.

As We May Think, however, tackles an interesting subject. Bush believed that the process and spread of information should be more open for the people, and that the threads of information should be able to be compiled easily and gracefully in comparison to the rigid catalog of information at the time.

I think it is safe to say that the internet, which was being developed for over decades with the example of Arpanet, is borne from Bush’s ideas. The accessibility of information is something that I take for granted, but hearing all of this has opened my eyes in terms of how much work went into something that has become a daily part of the society that I live in. I hope to learn more about the origins of the various aspects of the internet as this class goes along, whether from lectures or the assigned readings.