Author: blogrh
About blogrh
Posts by Richard Hirsh:
I never got into computer games. What’s wrong with me?
I remember going with friends to a bar sometime in the 1970s in which the game “Pong” became the centerpiece of activities. My friends and I competed to see who could get the highest score. I found the game fun, but I didn’t want to throw away all those quarters just to see if I […]
McLuhan and Determinism: I really have little choice!
Marshall McLuhan’s media work has been criticized as being technologically determinist. In other words, he supposedly argues that new media technologies (such as the printing press, radio, and TV) effectively dictate the actions of people who use the technologies. In a determinist approach, human choice is minimized or disappears altogether. In the world of the […]
Computer Lib or Computer Fib?
We have been reading about visionaries who have (correctly) forecast some amazing things that computers can do. Most recently, we read how Ted Nelson described (in the 1970s) how computer images on screens could be resized, how people will uses their fingers instead of styli or other pointers, and how these technologies will make it […]
I ate lunch with Douglas Engelbart!
In 2001, I ate lunch with Doug Engelbart—the guy who invented the mouse. Too bad I didn’t know anything about him at the time. I was attending the annual meeting of my professional association, the Society for the History of Technology, in Pasadena, California. Turned out that Mr. Engelbart was an invited guest speaker at […]
Cybernetics, symbiosis, and my messy room
When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I read a book on the novel topic of cybernetics. Designed for young readers, the book foretold how computer-driven machines would allow us humans to do wonderful things in the near future. I looked forward to being able to do a lot more creative things in much […]
V. Bush and the role of science in making new technologies
Vannevar Bush has rightly been credited as having marshaled American resources in science and technology to help create weapons (such as radar and the atomic bomb) that proved vital in World War II. He translated those insights into his book, Science: The Endless Frontier, and fostered thinking in the policy realm that was simple and […]
First experience with blogging and NLI class
I like to think of myself as pretty tech savvy. However, I am increasingly finding that people who set up websites or who write instructions for doing so expect users to know as much about the hardware and software as they do. As I created my new (and first ever) blogging account, I was asked […]
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