Dertouzos, M. (1997). What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our lives. San Francisco: Harper Edge.
The Forward to this book is written by Bill Gates, the famous and often controversial head of the world's largest software firm, Microsoft. Gates outlines author Dertouzos' distinctive qualifications for writing the book, as a pioneer in information technology and its applications and current member of the consortium that manages the technical aspects of the Internet. Gates characterizes the potential of this technology as "rich and promising," and its sum effect as creating a "new world" (1997, p. xiii). No specific information is provided about the contents of the book itself.
Author Dertouzos' Appendix, entitled "The Five Pillers of the Information Age," starting on page 349 of the text, is a brief introduction to the technical aspects of information technology: that is, the basic principles on which computers and the communication networks linking them operate. This Appendix has two distinct if related purposes. One is to penetrate some of the mystery of how computers do what they do, showing that the most complex processing is made up of millions of simple operations. The other is to explain and put in context such familiar jargon as "byte" or "firewall," explaining what these terms mean and how they fit into the overall picture. The Five Pillars are:
1. Numbers, Numbers, Everywhere. This section outlines how number values can be used to store all sorts of information besides the obviously numerical. The most detailed example is of how an image, such as a photograph, can be represented as an array of pixels, each one coded to indicate its color and brightness. This example is suitably chosen. On the one hand, most readers will have some awareness of computer graphics, including terms like pixel, while on the other hand an image is a type of information that seems particularly non-numerica...