This paper surveys two thematic units covering the history and social dimensions of technology. The first unit traces the development of the Internet from J.C.R. Licklider's 1960 vision through ARPANET, the TCP/IP protocol, the dot-com bubble, and early applications such as Hotmail and Wikipedia. It also examines demographic participation in science and engineering, including projections to 2050 for women, minorities, and persons with disabilities. The second unit reviews articles on IT ethics, addressing programmer culture, Bill Joy's philosophical concerns about unchecked technological advancement, the Open Source philosophy behind Linux, Google's philanthropic model, the hacker ethic, and the theory of exponential technological progress.
The first unit deals with the creation of the Internet as a global network, beginning with the foundational work of scientist J.C.R. Licklider in 1960. His vision was for a network of computers connected to one another that would collectively provide access to the entire volume of information then held in libraries. That idea began to take shape at the U.S. Department of Defense level when DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) was created in 1962, and part of DARPA informally began working on the concept of networking.
The idea of an interconnected networking system was further developed with the creation of a network connection between the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute in 1969, to which two other universities were added later that same year. By 1981, this incipient form of the Internet already had 213 hosts, with more being added continuously from that point forward. At the same time, this had remained an American-based project; Europeans were working on a separate network project that was not connected to the American one.
The European network relied on X.25 and related communication standards, with the first International Packet Switched Service being founded in 1978. That service eventually extended to nearly all continents as a multifunction protocol available for business use. From the merger of all existing networks, the Internet emerged as a network using the TCP/IP protocol. It became the global norm, with the Internet taking hold in Japan, Thailand, and Australia. As technology expanded and diversified, the Internet also became available on mobile phones with the introduction of the Nokia 9000 Communicator.
As the Internet developed, more and more applications were created to facilitate communication between users — such as email applications — and to make it easier to find and organize information, including tools like Gopher, the FTP Archive, and the browsers that followed. For finding information, search engines and web directories either crawled Internet pages or grouped information together according to similar criteria. With the development of the World Wide Web, the Internet could now be easily accessed by users, delivering information to a large number of individuals.
The history of the Internet also includes the great dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when an abundance of companies went online and attempted to transform the entire concept of business by revolutionizing every element of commercial activity. While many of these ventures proved successful, a large number of the newly created Internet companies did not survive the deflation of the bubble.
The development of new applications went hand in hand with new technologies during the 1990s, particularly the development of the Java platform. Some applications targeted communication over the Internet, most notably Hotmail, which was created and launched in 1996, initially as a free service to market the product. The Hotmail website quickly attracted followers; there were approximately one million subscribers within the first six months after launch. The product was later sold to Microsoft after only a year and a half, with the founder continuing to work for Microsoft for a period thereafter. Hotmail is considered to have grown its customer base and audience faster than any other media or telecommunications product, though many still felt that the $400 million paid for it was simply too much for an email application.
With new developments came a renewed focus on organizing and providing easier access to information. Wikipedia is the clearest example: free, openly available information on virtually any topic a user can think of. The concept itself is notable in that anyone can access and edit its content.
The latter part of the first unit examines statistics on national science participation across different demographic groups, including women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in science and engineering fields.
The analysis is particularly interesting in that it covers projections extending to 2050. In terms of racial participation, statistics project that Hispanic, Black, and Asian/Pacific Islander populations will all increase their representation in science and engineering. The distribution of educational studies among different ethnicities is also revealing. Data show that the Asian population is more inclined toward engineering, while white and Black students are more inclined toward the social sciences. Other fields — such as biological sciences and mathematics — show a reasonably similar and equal distribution across different ethnicities.
"Programmer culture and Bill Joy's philosophical warnings"
"Linux community, Open Source ethics, and hacker moral framework"
"Doubling rate of technical progress and 1990s economic growth"
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