Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology

Author - Howard Rheingold ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from The MIT Press was reviewed on 7-Oct-2008.

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1) Paperback Book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by The MIT Press.
This book (first published in 1985 with an afterward by Rheingold written for the 2000 MIT Press edition) is not about the history or development of computers or the history of electronics concurrent with the history of computers. It is not about computer design, computer hardware, computer architecture, computer programming, or computer software. It is about a selected few people in the history of computers and how amazing Rheingold thinks they and their ideas were. Only incidentally, and rarely, do we learn anything about what computers were like during the period these people were active or influential. This is a book written by a cheerleader. Rheingold is more interested in waving his pom-poms than allowing us to see the background details for what all his cheering is about.

His divides his team into three groups and lists them in chapter one:

Patriarchs - Charles Babbage, George Boole, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon.

Pioneers - J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Taylor, Alan Kay.

Infonauts - Avron Barr, Brenda Laurel, Ted Nelson.

From Babbage to Shannon the book kept my interest. But in later chapters its lack of detail and incessant cheerleading diminishes the value of the book. Overall the book is superficial. It came out at the mid-point of the 1980s, when the computer was on everyone´s mind with the advent of the IBM PC (1981) and the Apple Macintosh (1984). The interest was in this new age of "mind tools" and how science-fictiony and cool the future was going to be, and how the computer was going to "augment" our mind and make us all really, really smart and efficient. Rheingold seems to see the computer as becoming the technological analogue of the 1960s counterculture´s "mind expanding drug" without the bad trips of the chemical originals.

Rheingold says in his 2000 Preface that the book was written in 1983, although he squeezed in a couple sentences mentioning the Macintosh: on page 207 in reference to the PARC Alto, and on page 229 in reference to the earlier PARC inspired Apple Lisa.

Curiously, in a book with the subtitle of "The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology", Rheingold never discusses the actual applications of this new technology and how indeed the computer has made an extraordinary difference. He is silent on this even in the 2000 Afterward, where he could have discussed the advances made since the initial publication of the book and could have imagined future "mind-expanding" applications. He refers to the Internet, but of course by 2000 that was the Really Big Deal in the use of computers. But even there he has nothing of interest to say.
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2) Paperback Book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by The MIT Press. Unwittingly maybe, Rheingold provides a really good account and even reference of the history of computing. He writes well and unlike some CS writers marries his subject with the real world. If you are studying the history of computing I really recommend this over Ceruzzi´s book.¤

3) Paperback Book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by The MIT Press.

Howard Rheingold, former Editor of the Whole Earth Review and one of the pure-gold original thinkers in the Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly circle, lays down a serious challange to both decisionmakers and software producers that has yet to be fully understood. Originally published in 1985, this book was a "must read" at the highest levels of advanced information processing circles then, but sadly its brilliant and coherent message has yet to take hold--largely because bureaucratic budgets and office politics are major obstacles to implementing new models where the focus is on empowering the employee rather than crunching financial numbers.

This book is a foundation reading for understanding why the software Bill Gates produces (and the Application Program Interfaces he persists in concealing) will never achieve the objectives that Howard and others believe are within our grasp--a desktop toolkit that not only produces multi-media documents without crashing ten times a day, but one that includes modeling & simulation, structured argument analysis, interactive search and retrieval of the deep web as well as commercial online systems, and geospatially-based heterogeneous data set visualization--and more--the desktop toolkit that emerges logically from Howard´s vision must include easy clustering and linking of related data across sets, statistical analysis to reveal anomalies and identify trends in data across time, space, and topic, and a range of data conversion, machine language translation, analog video management, and automated data extraction from text and images. How hard can this be? VERY HARD. Why? Because no one is willing to create a railway guage standard in cyberspace that legally mandates the transparency and stability of Application Program Interfaces (API). Rheingold gets it, Gates does not. What a waste!¤

4) Paperback Book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by The MIT Press. The Afterword alone is worth the price of the book. Rarely does a thinker with the acumen of Rheingold also exhibit a willingness to re-examine, refine, and, on occasion, reverse positions taken a decade or more ago. Rheingold does in a way that is informative and mind-opening. Aside from the mound of solid information and provocative observations about the Internet in human life, Rheingold´s prose is as comfortable and welcoming as those toes tucked into the grass as he composes on his laptop. A must read.¤

5) Paperback Book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by The MIT Press. Entering the 21st century it´s still amazing to find that so many of the pioneers of computing are still alive. Rheingold has interviewed many of them over the years and this book is an interesting and valuble contribution to the genre.

The novel feature of the book is the way in which past interviews are brought up to date and the interviewees give their opinions on the differences between what they predicted and what happened.

The writing is excellent and very accessible. The interviewees come across as very normal people (which indeed they are) but it is very easy to forget they were still amongst the movers and shakers of computing in the late 20th century.

I think this book is a valuble work for those who see technology are more than just a vehicle for making money.¤

6) Paperback Book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by The MIT Press. The digital revolution did not begin with the teenage millionaires of Silicon Valley, claims Howard Rheingold, but with such early intellectual giants as Charles Babbage, George Boole, and John von Neumann. In a highly engaging style, Rheingold tells the story of what he calls the patriarchs, pioneers, and infonauts of the computer, focusing in particular on such pioneers as J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, and Alan Kay. Taking the reader step by step from nineteenth-century mathematics to contemporary computing, he introduces a fascinating collection of eccentrics, mavericks, geniuses, and visionaries.

The book was originally published in 1985, and Rheingold´s attempt to envision computing in the 1990s turns out to have been remarkably prescient. This edition contains an afterword, in which Rheingold interviews some of the pioneers discussed in the book. As an exercise in what he calls "retrospective futurism," Rheingold also looks back at how he looked forward.¤

7) Paperback Book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by The MIT Press. Where will our new machines take us? Back in 1985, forward-thinking Howard Rheingold asked research pioneers to describe the nascent personal-computer revolution and its trajectory, then examined their predecessors´ work, in Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology.

Republished 15 years later with a new afterword by the author, the book is an excellent slice of "retrospective futurism"--showing how we got to our largely wired world and where we might find ourselves in the future, as well as exploring some might-have-been scenarios that still seemed likely in the ´80s. Starting with engaging portraits of such important thinkers as Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, and Jon von Neumann, Rheingold swiftly and seamlessly moves into more current affairs, checking out the men and women behind Xerox PARC, ARPANET, Apple, Microsoft, and other cornerstones of today´s environment.

Some of the interviewees are less well known than they should be--the immensely popular World Wide Web often overshadows Doug Englebart´s ideas, for example--but all have made important contributions to personal computing and networking. Some of the ideas in the book, like expert systems, have floundered somewhat from their creators´ original intentions, but the creativity and determination to follow through regardless is inspiring.

Rheingold is adept at showing us how technology can help us shape a better human destiny. Tools for Thought reminds us that today´s wild ideas are what bring tomorrow´s radical change. --Rob Lightner¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 4-Nov-2008, 02626811539780262681155, 900-340-530-180-730-120-180-361-VWB-8

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