ABSTRACT
The Information Age did not spring fully formed from the dust of the old industrial era. Rather, it emerged gradually, in three more or less distinct phases, each defined by the bulk flow technology available to transmit information. The first phase extended from 1958 when the integrated circuit was invented to about 1970 when the forerunner of the microprocessor appeared. The second phase of the Information Age, which corresponds roughly to the decade of the 1970s, can be seen now as a transition between the last days of the fading industrial era and the beginnings of a truly global economy and culture. From the early 1980s, we have been in phase three of the Information Age, characterized by an information network based on technologies that are small, highly interactive, extremely cheap (per unit of information processed), with low energy requirements and extremely flexible and responsive programmability.
