I’ve decided to write a series of articles touching upon ID-relevant portions of the seminal book describing the nanotechnology revolution “Engines of Creation” by K. Eric Drexler. The book was originally published in hardcover in 1986 and purchased/read by me that year. This year marks its 20th anniversary and is a good point to take a look at where its predictions on the path and nature of the nanotechnology revolution stand two decades later.
It is now in the public domain in hypertext format here: Engines of Creation
For this introductory article I want to skip up to the second to last chapter.
EOC Chapter 14: The Network of Knowledge
Chapter 14 discusses the (at the time: 1986) revolutionary new concept of hypertext and the information explosion it would cause, surpassing the importance of the Gutenberg printing press which was so critical to the 15th century Renaissance. These predictions in information technology have now come to pass with the world wide web, google, and even blogs.
I was privileged to have worked on the periphery of the guys in the Xanadu project at Autodesk back in 1986. I was a third party hardware/software developer for the Autodesk cad/cam product “AutoCad”. I had founded a graphics board company “Autograf” and designed the fastest vector graphics rendering engine available for the IBM personal computer at the time. But that’s another story…
Please give EOC chapter 14 a quick read during the next week before I get around to the next article in this series.