So that’s that: Babbage realized machines could do math. Turing added that they could also run programs. Von Neumann figured out how to build the hardware, and Shannon showed how the software could do things that didn’t at first look like math problems.

The notion that a channel has a specific information capacity, which can be measured in bits per second, has had a profound influence.

Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became the c