ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, we acquired the ability to transmit information via waves of electric pulses, first over a physical medium, and then through the air. By the mid-twentieth century, these matured technologies had brought us to the brink of the Information Age. In the 1920s, the radio industry fostered the invention and development of another high-impact technology of the Information Age: television. The transition to the Information Age would require a new paradigm of the role of computers in society and that new paradigm required in turn a new technology to replace the vacuum tube. Thus, by the close of the 1950s, there had emerged a full set of institutions to carry out the mission of promoting—;;and profiting from—;;the application of bulk flow technologies to information. Despite the enormous size and financial weight of these institutions, in the end it would be something quite tiny that would produce a new paradigm for the Information Age.
