The Bible seems to have a thing against the census, for back in the time of David, we read in Chronicles that God smote 70,000 Israelites because the king sent his general Joab to count the members of the tribes, even though the general had protested that it would be "a cause of trespass to Israel". And, of course, Jesus was born in Nazareth because his parents had to go there for the census, ordered from Rome by Caesar Augustus, an event which it is arguable condemned the Roman Empire to perish.

Such counting of heads was identified with the power of central authority, and long before William Gibson or George Orwell, the Biblical vision of what this meant was distinctly dystopian. Today, the universality of postcodes and social security numbers, barcodes on IDs which are scanned every time we pass through a checkpoint, credit cards which report every transaction we make and establish our financial trustworthiness, not to mention the numbers tattooed on the arms of the victims of the Holocaust, indicates that its vision is coming true, in frightening fashion.

Calculating machines had existed since the invention of the abacus, originally as lines traced in the dust in Babylon three millennia before Christ, or counters on a checkered table cloth in classical Rome (hence our financial term, "exchequer"), eventually crystallising into the form of beads strung on wire frames, still used in Arabian countries and the Orient today. More sophisticatedly, shortly after the wire-frame abacus came into use, the barber Ktesibios in the 3rd Century BC city of Alexandria invented the first self-regulating machine, a water clock, whose ingenious device for accommodating the falling pressure of the water supply as its cistern emptied is the ancestor of today’s lavatory flush toilet.

In 1620, the Dutch alchemist and inventor, Cornelis Drebble (inventor of the first submarine and discoverer of cochineal dye), created another self-regulating device, what was in effect a thermostat to maintain a constant temperature for the heat of the furnace in which he was trying to transmute base metals into gold. The thermostat worked, but his alchemical experiments did not.

A century and a half later, James Watt adapted a regulator which had been originally designed by Thomas Mead to ensure that an upper millstone would be lowered on to a lower stone when its speed was sufficient to grind grain into flour; as modified by Watt, the result was a means to control the speed of the hitherto impractical steam engine so that it became a device effective enough to power the industrial revolution. Watt’s regulator was known as a governor, a term related etymologically to the Greek kybernetes (a steersman), origin of the word "cybernetics", coined by Norbert Wiener in 1947.

At the time of Drebble, John Napier, the eighth laird of Merchiston, devised a method in 1617 for mechanically multiplying, dividing and taking square roots using ivory rods (hence the system was known as Napier’s bones). Napier’s main claim to fame was for his thesis on logarithms, Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Description, showing how it was possible to perform multiplications and divisions by addition and subtraction, ie a*b = 10^(log(a)+log(b)) and a/b = 10^(log(a)-log(b)). Thus was laid the theoretical basis for the slide rule, devised by his great contemporary, Edmund Gunter (1581-1626), but Napier’s bones worked without logs, multiplying by placing the "bones" side by side so the appropriate products could be read off.

Interestingly, while the abacus was a form of digital calculator, the slide rule was an analogue device, a distinction which was to become critical in the early (and, probably future) development of electronic computers. As Noah Kennedy explains it: "In using a slide rule, one derives arithmetical results by sliding the continuously marked scales relative to each other and reading the results directly from the scales. To perform a similar function with an abacus, one needs to move the tokens in the abacus according to a rigid set of rules through a number of discrete steps, each step dependent on the current arrangement of tokens and the rules for operating upon them. The slide rule relies on measuring the relative positions of the sliding logarithmic scales against each other, while the abacus relies on the correct appraisal at each discrete step of the correct number of tokens in each position." (The Industrialization of Intelligence, Unwin Hyman, London, 1989, pp. 84-85)

While Napier’s bones were no more than an intriguing mathematical toy, and the slide rule a powerful but complex tool for performing mathematical calculations, the industrial revolution required something both simple and accurate so that the new bourgeoisie could balance its books. In 1642, the 19-year-old Blaise Pascal, to become famous as the philosopher who also gave his name to a computer language three centuries later, had invented the Pascaline numerical wheel calculator to help his father, a French tax collector, in his work. It was a brass rectangular box with eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long. As one dial moved ten notches, or one complete revolution, it moved the next dial, representing the tens column, one place. The Pascaline could only do addition, not subtraction nor either multiplication or division.

Fifty years later, another philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, added multiplication to the gear-driven calculator, and in 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchman, invented the arithometer, a machine that could perform the four basic arithmetic functions, and which remained in use until World War I. All these calculating machines employed a similar principle to that used by the designer of what is seen as the first true computer, Charles Babbage, who envisaged using the punched cards of the Jacquard weaving machine as a memory store.

Babbage’s machine was not actually built until towards the end of the 20^th Century – a realisation of it was placed in the Science Museum in London in 1991 – and none of these devices was any more sophisticated than the electronic calculators even schoolchildren are allowed to use today in their maths exams. But the visionaries of the Enlightenment could see further – though their vision was limited by their conception of human beings as no more than mechanical devices.

Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709-1751), phyisician and disciple of Descartes, wrote in his significantly entitled work, Man the Machine: "All the functions, which I have ascribed to this machine, naturally proceed from the organisation of its several parts no more and no less than the movements of a clock or other automaton proceed from the disposition of its screws and wheels, so that it is quite unnecessary to suppose in this machine, ie man, any kind of soul, any special cause of movement and life, other than its blood and the forces within it that are stimulated by warmth."

Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), the 18th Century mathematician and astronomer who first advanced the theory that the solar system had condensed out of a rotating nebula of gas, defined the total knowledge for which he sought: "An intelligence knowing, at any given instant of time, all forces acting in nature, as well as the momentary positions of all things of which the universe consists, would be able to comprehend the motions of the largest bodies of the world and those of the smallest atoms in one single formula, provided it were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it, nothing would be uncertain, both future and past would be present before its eyes."

Laplace’s "intelligence" was a new name for God, two hundred years before the science fiction author, Fredric Brown, had shown in his short story, Answer (1954), that if all the world’s computers were linked together, they might be considered to constitute exactly the sort of superhuman intelligence Laplace had posited ("Is there a God? There is now."); though Laplace had replied, when Napoleon complained there was no reference to a Creator in his Mécanique céleste, "Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse." ("I had no need of this hypothesis.")

Babbage’s inspiration actually came from the French Enlightenment, or rather the mathematical tables that Gaspard de Prony had created for Napoleon, filling 17 folio volumes. By an exciting example of the synergy that existed between commercial practice and theoretical science in those expansionist days, de Prony had been inspired, in his turn, by the first chapter in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, entitled "Of the Division of Labour". Instead of assigning the computational task to a team of skilled mathematicians, which would have taken years to complete, de Prony broke it down into its constituent parts, so that the bulk of the slog became simple tasks of addition and subtraction – he deskilled it, in modern parlance – with results, according to Noah Kennedy (p. 44) that were "more accurate than [could have been achieved by] their peers whose understanding of mathematics was greater". This was an intriguing precursor of the way in which digital computers would do their calculations, since basically all these inherently stupid devices can do is to add and subtract ones and zeroes with phenomenal speed.

The story of how Babbage sought to mechanise these procedures, and his eventual failure to do so, is a sad commentary on the limitations of the government of the time. Remarkably, having originally proposed his "difference engine" to the Royal Society in London in July 1822, he managed to obtain a total of £17,000 funding from central government, thanks to the intervention of his aristocratic assistant, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron (after whom the US Defense Dept named its Ada programming language); a working model was built ten years later. However, when he developed his ideas into a proposal for a much more advanced "analytical engine", utilising the punched cards of the Jacquard weaving machine for the storage of data, the authorities balked, and while the Royal Society was still working on the costs of building it after his death in 1871, his work was neglected and abandoned.

As Kennedy says: "The spin-offs in machining and engineering design that Babbage engendered even in building his small difference engine would doubtlessly have been multiplied in myriad ways, and it is chilling to wonder if the long, downward economic slide that England commenced in the latter half of the 19^th Century would have occurred if Babbage’s project had been funded and if his vision of state sponsorship of science and industry had taken hold."

Though Babbage is mentioned in most of the standard histories of computing, both the difference engine and the analytical engine were in fact dead ends of development, being cumbersome mechanical devices dependent upon steam. More significant was the contribution of a contemporary, a self-taught Lincolnshire teacher of mathematics, George Boole, who became Professor at Queens College, Cork, in 1849, and invented the science of algebraic logic which bears his name. What has now become known as Boolean logic he described as applying "a new and peculiar form of Mathematics to the expression of the operations of the mind in reasoning", which stated that maths could be considered "not as a mere collection of signs, but as a system of expression, the elements of which are subject to the laws of the thought which they represent". Therefore any mathematical equation could be considered as logical statement, and vice versa, so if A is true and so is B, then A+B=1; if either one or the other is untrue, then A+B=0.

Today, Boolean logic is used extensively in database searches, when search terms can be linked together by AND, OR, or NOT statements, but it is central to the way in which computers work, as was demonstrated a century after his ground-breaking "The Calculus of Logic" (Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal, Vol. III, 1848). In 1940, Professor John V. Atanasoff of Iowa, and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, applied Boolean algebra to computer circuitry (whose switches could be either on – true – or off – false) in their proposal for an all-electronic computer. Tragically (and not untypically) Atanasoff and Berry were unable to obtain funding to put their theories into practice, and for a time lost their honoured place in computer history. The pair had to go to law to establish their claim to have originated the digital computer, which was given legal acceptance in 1973.

The neglect they suffered, and also by Babbage in his time, was due more to bureaucratic mismanagement and doctrinaire adherence to laissez-faire economics than to any innate hostility to the mechanisation of intelligence, but voices of warning that human beings might be threatened by the growing rule of the machine were being raised, mainly in works of literature.

Books like Samuel Butler’s Erewon (the first part of which was originally published in The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand as "Darwin Among the Machines", on June 13, 1863), presented a utopia, where they had prevented machines from supplanting humanity:

"I learnt that about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the most learned professors of hypothetics wrote an extraordinary book . . . proving that the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life. So convincing was his reasoning, or unreasoning, to this effect, that he carried the country with him and they made a clean sweep of all machinery that had not been in use for more than two hundred and seventy-one years (which period was arrived at after a series of compromises), and strictly forbade all further improvements and inventions . . ."

In The Machine Stops (1909), E.M. Forster described a society entirely dominated by the machine, where again it has acquired the characteristics of a deity, and virtually all communication is electronic: "I believe that you pray to it [the Machine] when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you." The catastrophe predicted in the story’s title happens, and humanity crawls out of its tunnels to live below the sky:

In the same year as Forster, Ambrose Bierce posed the question of whether a machine could think, and answered it (in anachronistic throwback to La Mettrie and Laplace): "Is not a man a machine? And you will admit he thinks – or thinks he thinks."

The Czech playwright, Karel Capek introduced the word "robot" (derived from robotnik, in Czech, which means a serf) into the language with his expressionist drama, RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in 1920, which he explained was not so much directed at the robots, as the short-sightedness of their creators: "I wished to write a comedy, partly of science, partly of truth. The odd inventor, Mr. Rossum (whose name translated into English signifies ‘Mr. Intellectual’ or ‘Mr. Brain’), is a typical representative of the scientific materialism of the last century. His desire to create an artificial man – in the chemical and biological, not the mechanical sense – is inspired by a foolish and obstinate wish to prove God unnecessary and absurd. Young Rossum is the young scientist, untroubled by metaphysical ideas; scientific experiment to him is the road to industrial production. He is not concerned to prove but to manufacture. . . Those who think to master the industry are themselves mastered by it; Robots must be produced although they are a war industry, or rather because they are a war industry. The product of the human brain has escaped the control of human hands. This is the comedy of science."

Technology had begun to influence "high art" throughout the first half of the century: cubism abandoning the single viewpoint of the representational artist for the multifaceted mosaic of the yellow press and John Dos Passos (1896-1970) emulating the newsreel in USA (written between 1930 and 1936). But the most technologically percipient of the great writers of the 20th Century was James Joyce, who drew not only upon the cinema in his monumental but (for many) impenetrable "newseryeel", Finnegans Wake (1939), whose "monthage" was based on techniques he had discussed in Paris with Sergei Eisenstein, enthusiastic Soviet advocate of D.W. Griffiths’ cinematic montage, but also upon radio ("Whoishe linking in?") in a manner that harks forward to the brief flowering of Citizens Band, for which the Internet is currently the contemporary analogue, and even, though it had barely been invented yet, to television (his hero’s "tellavicious nieces"), and to magnetic recording tape ("Say mangraphique, may say nay por daguerre!"), which wasn’t to become generally available in the Western world until the end of the war, when the US conquerors "liberated" the technology from the German BASF company, after the fall of Berlin. All this, said Joyce, was to result in "the abnihilisation of the etym", or the printed word, anticipating McLuhan’s prediction of the end of the "Gutenberg Galaxy"..

It is astonishing that neither Jules Verne nor H. G. Wells, the pioneers of science fiction who predicted such machine-age wonders as the submarine and the tank, envisaged such an all-encompassing mechanical intelligence, though they must have known of Babbage’s work. Wells disparaged those who were disenchanted with the utopian potential of science in his "future history", The Shape of Things to Come (1933) in terms that made it clear he was still fighting battles with 19th Century opponents of industrialism like William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites: "It was not so much that the writers desired civilisation to retrace its steps, as that they wished that no more steps should be taken. They wanted things to stop – oh, they wanted them to stop! The underlying craving was for consolidation and rest before more was lost. There was little coherent system in the objections taken; it was objection at large. Mass production was very generally reprehended; science rarely got a good word; war – with modern weapons – was condemned, though much was to be said for the ‘chivalrous’ warfare of the past; there were proposals to ‘abolish’ aeroplanes and close all the laboratories in the world; it was assumed that hygiene, and especially sexual hygiene , ‘robbed life of romance’; the decay of good manners since the polished days of Hogarth, Sir Charles Grandison and Tony Lumpkin was deplored, and the practical disappearance of anything that could be called Style."

Yet in their concern for what was later to be called ecology, Morris and his comrades had been the true seers of the future, Wells the man rigidly rooted in the world of the lever and the cogwheel. This was illustrated by his apparent unawareness of the new electronic age which was rendering obsolescent many of his dearest conceptions.

Though the telephone network was already spreading across the world, and while Wells hailed the abolition of distance as one of the driving forces of a new world superpower he called the Modern State, it was the mechanical technology of aircraft and steamship that he saw as the driving force, not electronics: ". . . already in 1960 seven-eighths of the aviators were Modern State men, and most of the others" . . . were . . . "at least infected with these same ideas. . ." (Remember, this was being written in the early Thirties.) And at the very time that Wells was putting the finishing touches to Things to Come, a young English mathematical genius called Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954), was working on a paper called "On Computable Numbers", which was to provide the foundation upon which the entire future of computers was to be built. He played a significant part, during the war, in helping to break the Nazis’ "Enigma" code, but was persecuted after it, during the Cold War paranoia about homosexuals who might have access to sensitive data, and committed suicide by eating an apple dipped in cyanide, at the age of 41.

Turing was grappling with a problem raised by the German mathematician, David Hilbert (1862-1943), the Entscheidungsproblem, or search for what we would now call "a theory of everything", a single process that could be used to answer each and every mathematical question put to it. The "proof" of Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) that within any closed system, axioms of that system could only be proved or disproved by reference to outside the system, suggested that this was not possible.

Turing’s approach was to consider a machine able to read and write to a paper tape (magnetic tape not having been invented yet), and to change its own state according to what it read or wrote. If it came across symbol x, for instance, it could change this to symbol y, before moving on to the next symbol. Then, in a remarkable leap indicative of his true genius, he conceived of a "universal" version of his machine, which meant that if machine a and machine b were both given the same set of instructions to read, then they became, in effect, the same machine. (Remember, both machines were in his head, and were not to achieve tangible form for two decades.)

In effect, what he was doing was to apply to the question Gaspard de Prony’s strategy of breaking down large computational problems into smaller, de-skilled tasks. It also meant that, if a problem could be broken down in this way, it would be impossible for a bystander to know whether the resulting computation was the product of a human being or a machine. (He also proved, incidentally, that there was no solution to Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem.) In effect, Turing had invented computer programming.

Turing’s machine was not built, but his concept is applied every time any computer is powered up, whether it be a humble palmtop, or a mighty Cray supercomputer.

One cannot blame Wells for not knowing of Turing’s work, which occurred at the more rarified levels of pure mathematics, but since Turing himself drew upon Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica (a book which had a powerful influence upon early 20^th Century thinking) and had roots dating back to Thomas Hobbes’ Computation, or Logique, it is surprising that Wells betrayed no evidence that he felt thinking machines would play a significant role in the future he was purporting to document. His lesser successors in the field of pulp science fiction were more perceptive. Two years after Vannevar Bush made the first analogue computer in 1925, Hugo Gernsback’s pioneering science fiction pulp, Amazing Stories, published a story, "The Thought Machine", in which the author, Aaron Nadel, posited a "Psychomach", "a device of a hundred thousand parts, that in its different divisions would perform nearly all the simpler operations of the human mind". Perhaps he had been reading Laplace.

Turing was not unique in his thinking, which paralleled that of the American logician Alonzo Church at Princeton, but he was unique in proposing a practical application of what to others was an abstract question of pure logic. Turing himself went to Princeton in September of that year – after his paper had been completed, but before it was published, so in it he had to acknowledge Church’s work – but he came to the attention of John (originally Janos) von Neumann (1903-1957), a Hungarian-American mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania, with consequences that were not to become obvious until the coming war was virtually over. von Neumann was an amazing polymath, a contemporary of Hilbert’s, who began publishing papers on logic, game theory, quantum mechanics, and economics in the late Twenties. Working in 1944 as part of a team led by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the Moore School of Engineering, in Philadelphia, developing a high-speed calculator for the US Army Ballistics Research Laboratory, von Neumann put together a paper summarising their collective opinion on the theoretical problems and their likely solution. The paper influenced the design of all subsequent computers, and as a result, the basic concept is usually known as a "von Neumann machine", though it would be more accurate to describe it as a "Moore school machine", or even an "Eckert-Mauchly machine".

The Moore team were working on a calculator known as ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), utilising 18,000 valves (or vacuum tubes, in US parlance), 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and a bank of 6,000 switches, each of which had to be set by hand to "program" the machine. They had already realised this was not satisfactory before von Neumann joined them, and were working on the design for ENIAC’s successor, EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Computer). A vital difference between the two was that ENIAC was an analogue device, while EDVAC was digital (a distinction we have already seen, between the analogue slide rule, and the 2000-years-older digital abacus). The former is closer to the human brain, since it measures activities in the real world, such as (in von Neumann’s own words) "the angle by which a certain disk has rotated, or the strength of a certain current, or the amount of a certain (relative) voltage". For each new function, a new computer needs to be built. Digital computers do counting — and that’s all they do. But as long as a task can be rendered down to a process of counting, then a digital computer is more versatile.

(Another significant difference between ENIAC and EDVAC was that the former was a parallel device, that could perform many tasks concurrently, but EDVAC was serial, doing one thing after another — though very, very quickly.)

Incidentally, at the same time that the Moore team was working on ENIAC, Konrad Zuse in Germany was building tape-based calculators, the fourth generation of which were used during the development of the V2 rockets which targeted London during the closing year of the war. He also invented Plankalkul, probably the first programming language. The Nazi High Command didn’t see the significance of Zuse’s work, and ordered it stopped (much as they had decried Einstein’s e=mc² equation, core of the thinking behind the atom bomb, as Jewish, and therefore beneath contempt).

The von Neumann architecture (as it came to be known) combined Turing’s concept of a machine that would perform functions by reading them from a storage device serially, one at a time, with a new idea, that such a machine could store such instructions in internal memory, and access them in a non-serial manner. To get to any one portion of a tape, you have to start at the beginning and read through to the section you needed — a tedious process, as anyone who has searched through a compact audio cassette for their favourite music will testify — but it was possible to access a memory location by going direct to its address. So while the von Neumann machine could still only perform one function at a time, it did so in a manner not determined by the linear medium. The Moore team had invented what we now know as random access memory.

Eckert and Mauchly resigned when the US Army attempted to claim that their researches were not patentable, since von Neumann’s paper had placed them in the public domain, and they went on to design UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) for Remington Rand, which astonished everyone by predicting the winner of the 1952 presidential election, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Another important member of the team was Norbert Wiener, the mathematician who originated the term "cybernetics" — although this is applied almost exclusively today to electronics systems, to Wiener and his associates it also applied to biological systems, and as well as fellow mathematicians and engineers, he also worked with physiologists on topics like heart flutter and fibrillation. They conducted some rather gruesome experiments on cats, examining the feedback function in their quadriceps extensor femoris muscles , "paying attention to the physiological condition of the cat, the load on the muscle, the frequency of the oscillation, the base level of the oscillation, and its amplitude", and using strychnine to increase the reflex responses.

In his book, Cybernetics (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1948), he summarised conclusions he had reached as early as 1940 when considering how computing machines could be used for the solution of partial differential equations. His view — that they should be digital not analogue, electronic rather than mechanical, calculating on a binary (base 2) rather than decimal (base 10) basis, that "all logical decisions necessary . . . should be built into the machine itself", and that it should be able to write, store, erase and rewrite data as required — echoes the conclusions reached by von Neumann and Turing, though he didn’t meet the young Englishman until he visited Manchester in 1947.

Despite his seeming insensitivity to the feelings of other sentient beings — work which he described as "both possible and promising" — Wiener was almost unique in realising that the development of intelligent machines had as much potential for evil as good:

He made contact with representatives of the Congress of Industrial Organisations trade union organisation in the United States to discuss these implications, but while they gave him a sympathetic hearing, he found them "totally unprepared to enter into the larger political, technical, sociological, and economic questions which concern the very existence of labor" (ibid, p. 28).

His appreciation of the implications of automation to the labour force was echoed by Kurt Vonnegut jr in his percipient science fiction novel, Player Piano of 1952, but to many authors it was the effects of computerised supervision which filled them with anxiety, none more than George Orwell, whose world in 1984 was ruled by "Big Brother", maintaining his dictatorship by means of Thought Police who could snoop on every citizen via a Telescreen in the corner of the room:

Orwell’s savage satire has been widely misunderstood, largely misdirected by his description of the "big moustachios" displayed on the omnipresent posters with their warning that "Big Brother Is Watching You", which suggested an equivalence with Stalin. However, Orwell’s target was rather closer at home: the "state" he is describing is actually the BBC, where he worked as a talks producer in the Indian section of the Eastern service from 1941 to 1943 (I was acquainted with him somewhat later, when he became literary editor of Tribune, the leftist weekly, since we both attended meetings of the Trade and Periodical Branch of the National Union of Journalists). The "Ministry of Truth" which operates in his book under the slogan, "Ignorance is Strength", is a parody of the Ministry of Information, a wartime body which had been set up to monitor and control the propaganda effect of the media, whose boss, the extremely right-wing Tory, Brendan Bracken, had draconian powers which Orwell felt had cramped his style still three years after the Ministry was wound up by Clement Attlee, the incoming Labour prime minister following a war fought for freedom of speech. Bracken had been preceded by Sir John (later Lord) Reith, the mandarin whose rule over the BBC from 1920 to 1938 created the atmosphere of cultural elitism which Orwell, the Eton-educated would-be prole, with his roll-up fags and slurping his tea from a saucer, a habit picked up when he was researching The Road to Wigan Pier, found particularly stultifying. (According to Timothy Leary, however, Aldous Huxley maintained that Orwell told him Big Brother was, in fact, Sir Winston Churchill; Orwell’s hero-victim is also called Winston.)

Orwell was investigated at least twice by the British "thought police" (actually Mr A.H. Young, director of information at the India Office); he was cleared both times, and indeed in 1996 some evidence emerged that he may actually have been recruited as a British agent within the left.

The book’s title, 1984, was created by neatly transposing the last two digits of the likely date of publication, 1948; this is not the future he was describing, but the constricting present of war-torn, ration-starved, austerity Britain. As Tom Hopkinson, former editor of Picture Post, wrote in 1953: "His world of 1984 is actually the world of 1944, but dirtier and more cruel. . . The war of 1984 is fought with the weapons of 1944, rockets and tommy-guns – all that has happened is that they are now less effective than they used to be; and the horror which distorts life in the future is merely the horror that hangs over life today." An early draft synopsis suggests that his work on 1984 began in 1943, when anxious BBC bureaucrats were asking the India Office if it was acceptable for this well-known advocate of Catalonian anarchists to be the voice of Britain, addressing a sub-continent impatient for independence.

In his lifetime, the sophistication of his Telescreen was far in advance, conceptually, of the rather cumbersome mechanical phonetapping which went on, often with the full knowledge of the victims, who could hear the clicks and clunks of the taps being switched on. Also, the use of human eavesdroppers meant that, ultimately, there would have to be at least half the population listening in on the other half. The unviable economics of such a system, and the national paranoia it induced, was one of the factors that brought down Soviet Communism. Today, of course, the sophistication of projects like the US National Security Administration facility in Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, allows them to intercept calls from all over the world, with computers that check all British Telecom, Mercury and Vodaphone conversations for suspect groups of phonemes (eg "bomb") that might indicate activities hostile to US interests, without most people ever being the wiser, despite the activities of some maverick Members of Parliament, who insist on putting down Early Day motions on the subject.

At about the same time that Orwell was beginning work on 1984, Hermann Hesse was working in Switzerland on Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, sometimes translated into English under the title Magister Ludi), a book which earned him the Nobel prize for literature. Timothy Leary described it, in typically overheated (but in this case, justifiable) prose:

In Hesse’s own words:

The book became an icon during the Sixties (hence Leary’s enthusiasm), and freed of its mystical overtones, harks forward to self-hypnotic obsession of today’s mainly young computer game players, developing unheard-of capabilities of hand-and-eye co-ordination that industrial society lets go entirely to waste. It must raise echoes in parents’ minds of Hesse’s recognition that "We would scarcely be exaggerating if we ventured to say that for the small circle of genuine Glass Bead Game players the Game was virtually equivalent to worship."

The hypnotic effects of electronic media have been widely observed, but the most perceptive analysis of exactly why they had this effect came from a Roman Catholic professor of literature who became patron saint of the cyberserfs: the late Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Professor of English at the University of Toronto, and coiner of such contemporary aphorisms as "the medium is the message" (or massage, as he put it in a later book) and "the global village", who penetrated so deeply into contemporary consciousness that Woody Allen gave him a walk-on part in Annie Hall. A conservative who confessed himself horrified by the media influences he was documenting – "I view such upheavals with total personal dislike and dissatisfaction. . . I am not by temperament or conviction a revolutionary; I would prefer a stable, changeless environment of modest services and human scale," he told Playboy magazine in March, 1969 – he predicted "a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system" long before the Internet was even just a gleam in the eye of the US Defense Dept.

Many of his thoughts enhanced our perceptions of the way electronic media were "re-tribalising" human society, drawing parallels between the oral culture of primitive humanity and the barbaric "yawp" of the post-industrial age, as foretold by Walt Whitman and documented by William Butler Yeats, in his chilling image of the "rough beast, its hour come round at last," which "slouches toward Bethlehem to be born".

Much of McLuhan’s insights were built upon Edward T. Hall’s perception that ". . . all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialised part of his body" (The Silent Language, Doubleday, New York, 1959, p. 79), but the conclusion he drew was a brilliant leap: "It is a principle aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric network, but it constitutes a single unified field of experience." (Understanding Media, Sphere Books edition, p.371)

To McLuhan, the term "media" extended far beyond means of communication to all such "extensions of man". As the wheel was an extension of the foot, then it also was a medium, and so was money. The computer, too, was an extension of the human brain, and thus, ". . . a conscious computer would still be one that was an extension of our consciousness, as a telescope is an extension of our eyes. . ." (Understanding Media, p.374)

In his terms, perceptions were determined not by the content of media, but by their forms, that the message was contained in the medium, not its content (which, he said, was usually derived from an older medium, as the content of film was the novel). Thus developments in the arts, such as perspective, were the creation of linear thinking, outgrowths of the Gutenberg age of movable type, placed in position, one letter at a time. But now electronic media were ushering in an end to "the lineality that came into the Western world with the alphabet and the continuous forms of Euclidean space."

He predicted a new decentralisation of authority in the world of computers, in opposition to the (never named specifically by McLuhan) dystopia of Orwell: ". . . the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy. Panic about automation as a threat of uniformity on a world scale is the projection into the future of mechanical standardisation and specialism, which are now past." (Understanding Media, conclusion, p. 382) It is interesting that he speaks of automation rather than computerisation, since this was the main application of the microprocessor at the time he wrote; nowhere does he consider the social implications of automated processes, and the unemployment likely to ensue (a subject dealt with by numerous science fiction writers, notably Kurt Vonnegut, as we have seen).

But he was percipient in forecasting the commoditisation of information: "As automation takes hold, it becomes obvious that information is the crucial commodity, and that solid products are merely incidental to information movement."

His explanation of the fascination exerted by television may be just as applicable to those who surf the Internet; while they fret at the way restricted bandwidth holds back the resolution of the images they download, they are actually working very hard to make sense of the data coming to them:

There is a lot to be said in favour of McLuhan’s new way of looking at human culture. Yet in his tendency to lump together all such "electric" devices as the (wind-up) gramophone (surely a mechanical device) and most notably the computer, as midwives to the new retribalisation of humanity, displayed an unfamiliarity with the actual forms of the media he was discussing. Audio and video tape is linear, but while the gramophone disc runs in a linear track from circumference to centre (similarly the digital compact disc, though in this case the track runs outwards from the centre), the ability to drop the pickup (or CD laser) at any point on the disc’s surface means that it is effectively non-linear.

There is a parallel here with the computer’s disk drives, and more significantly its random-access memory. Yet the computer, which can only do one thing at a time in compliance with the still extant von Neumann definition, is a decidedly linear device. Modern computers give the appearance of multi-tasking by switching rapidly between various tasks, and the limitations of a single processor are overcome by running multiple processors in parallel, yet each processor is still a linear device.

In fact the computer as we know it today is a mechanical-electronic hybrid, and the two areas of its parentage are in conflict with each other. It is often described loosely as a machine, and while it does include mechanical devices, such as the disk drives, based upon the mechanical principles of lever and wheel, its heart is totally non-mechanical. Yet this electronic heart has been made to function in a linear – that is, a mechanical way – in order to conform with the principles laid down by Turing and von Neumann.

If he had lived long enough to familiarise himself with this innate dialectic within the very structure of the computers he felt would play a role as "new media of information in altering the posture and relations of our senses" (The Gutenberg Galaxy, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962, p. 55), he might, perhaps, have modified the stance which has made him the hero of the cyber-utopians of magazines like Wired.

Had he lived, he would probably have been fascinated by the way a young science fiction author, nearly two decades after McLuhan’s death, not only depicted a future world where millions "jack in" to TV "simstim" programs which activate the pleasure centres of the brain, but also gave a name to the virtual reality they inhabit, a name coined on the very eve of the explosion of the Internet into global consciousness, and which has now passed into the language to live in encyclopaedias alongside McLuhan’s global village: cyberspace.

The young man’s name is William Gibson, and the dystopian vision of the opening words of his first novel is far from the stainless steel sterility of the movie Alexander Korda made from Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come:

The image is reminiscent of the grotty metropolis Lawrence G. Paull designed in 1982 for Ridley Scott’s cult movie, Bladerunner – which acquired its name, but little else, from a treatment by William S. Burroughs, and some of its story line from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Though computers are omnipresent in Scott’s film, with talking elevators and other "smart" hardware, the sort of inter-computer communication Gibson was to centre his action upon just two years later is conspicuously absent.

In 1984, a good decade before the Internet was to become a buzzword replacing the "Information Superhighway" in the mouths of political and media ignorami, Gibson was coining terms like cyberspace – defined by an electronic encyclopaedia in his novel as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system", otherwise known as the matrix. Today, the Internet is strictly a two-dimensional medium, despite rather Mickey Mouse attempts to simulate virtual reality with three-dimensional images and walk-through electronic malls. But here, in his first novel, despite never having observed the then text-based reality – or even perhaps because he had never observed it – Gibson envisaged an experience as different from the mundane reality of today’s World-Wide Web as WWW is from ABC:

Xerox have whole teams working on the three-dimensional representation of data in their Palo Alto Research Center, and have even released programs which try to display it on a two-dimensional VDU (dismal failures, for the most part), and no doubt when someone cracks it the result will be a lot less colourful than Gibson’s poetic vision. But like all his predecessors in various literary genres, from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia to the latest pulp at the corner news-stand, Gibson has been inventing a future that’s already looking a lot like his dreams.

The remarkable thing about William Gibson is that he knows next to nothing about computers. In fact, as he proudly tells interviewers, he doesn’t even own a modem (the MODulator/DEModulator which connects a computer to the telephone line and converts the digital signal to the analogue squawks of sound that can be transported over the wires), has no email address, and rarely surfs the Internet.

But then, he sees cyberspace in terms much wider than the exploits of a few million nerds jacked into the Internet in lieu of a life. In an interview in Stockholm on November 23, 1994, he pointed out that we already live in cyberspace: "Cyberspace is where we do our banking, it’s actually where the bank keeps your money these days because it’s all direct electronic transfer. It’s where the stock market actually takes place, it doesn’t occur so much any more on the floor of the exchange but in the electronic communication between the world’s stock exchanges."

He also pointed out that there is a significant and growing electronic underclass, who are alienated from the Internet, not because they’re technophobic — just watch them with their PlayStations, if that’s what you think — but for good old socio-economic reasons:

He makes some amusing — and not really significant — mistakes, for instance calling the chip that the cyberserfs jack into their necks a microsoft, for goodness sake; surely he’s heard of Bill Gates’ mighty kingdom of that name? (Gates didn’t sue; perhaps he appreciated the implicit compliment.) Also, his second novel, Count Zero carries the first-page epigraph: "COUNT ZERO INTERRUPT – On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero." Even by 1987, date of the book’s copyright line, this was an obsolescent programming command, relic of the days of dinosaur languages like Fortran and Cobol, the programmer’s equivalents to Middle English or Sanskrit: you won’t find such archaic syntax in contemporary languages like C++ or Java.

This, as I say, is less significant than his almost intuitive understanding of the way that electronics are now playing a part in human evolution, often encapsulated in short, almost haiku-like pronouncements: "the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human" (from Count Zero). The British zoologist, Richard Dawkins, has suggested, indeed, that natural selection is itself selecting for evolvability, and, in his book, The Selfish Gene (1976), that thinking machines could play a part in this. Some ten years later, he developed this thought in The Blind Watchmaker (1986):

Dawkins has hypothesised that these replicators are analogous to the genes of DNA, and so he calls them "memes", which he says "can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer", mutating as they propagate themselves. The result, he says, is a new kind of cultural evolution, which is itself "many orders of magnitude faster than DNA-based evolution".

Since he trained on mainframes, Dawkins is able to draw fascinating comparisons between electronic and biological evolution. He has developed programs to develop what he has called "biomorphs", complex geometrical designs which can be made to evolve according to rules that he himself has devised, such as symmetry, and even those which are aesthetically pleasing to him.

His earlier programs – written in Basic, it is surprising to learn, and not the higher-level languages one assumes he was also skilled in – had no capability to save the biomorphs he had discovered, and he was dismayed to lose a particularly beautiful one which he called the Holy Grail, offering $1000 of his own money to anyone who could rediscover it. No fewer than three programmers came forward to claim the cash, the first claimant having spent some 40 hours to "reverse engineer" the pretty picture.

It is frustrating that he dispels much of his energy in earnest attempts to apply his conclusions to re-runs of the 19^th Century controversies about Darwinism which so engaged T. H. Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce – son of the famous campaigner against the slave trade – and which are ultimately sterile in an age when quantum physics has decisively laid to rest the certainties of those great opponents, Victorian rationalism, and "young earth" creationism. In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins tells how he programmed a computer to "breed" meaningful phrases out of meaningless keystrokes typed by his 11-month-old daughter. In 11 seconds, his Pascal program turned the gibberish "Wdlmnt dtbkwirzrezlmqco p" into Hamlet’s "Methinks it is like a weasel", thus proving, to his own satisfaction, that the famous monkey with a typewriter and infinite time could indeed produce the works of Shakespeare.

But far from disproving the existence of a motivating force, Dawkins’ experiment does the opposite, for without a programmer – himself – playing the part of God, there is no way his computer could have produced anything from the gibberish. Indeed, without the pre-defined code in the computer’s BIOS (basic input/output system) and the "ASCII" code, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which translates keyboard switch pulses into alphanumeric characters on screen, so that ASCII code 65 (or on-off-off-off-off-off-on – 1000001– in binary) represents the letter "A" and 90 (binary 1011010) the letter "Z", his daughter’s keyboard input would not have been even perceptible gibberish.

His experiments with biomorphs are even more critical to the point he is trying to make so assiduously, for he himself demonstrates that, in his God-like role, he not only programs the process in train, but he also intervenes to ensure that it develops in ways pleasing to him: "You will notice that all the shapes are symmetrical about a left/right axis. This is a constraint that I imposed on the development procedure. I did it partly for aesthetic reasons; partly to economise on the number of genes necessary (if genes didn’t exert mirror-image effects on the two sides of the tree, we’d need separate genes for the left and the right sides); and partly because I was hoping to evolve animal like shapes and most animal bodies are pretty symmetrical." (The Blind Watchmaker, p. 55) As Kevin Kelly puts it, "Dawkins built an inherent grammar into his universe which prevented any old nonsense from appearing. Even a wild mutation would not arrive at a flat grey blob." (Out of Control, p. 349)

All this is significant, not in Dawkins’ own terms, as a broken stick to beat the creationists with, but because unless computers are able themselves to evolve procedures which are not only aesthetically pleasing but also non-threatening to biological life forms like their creators and the society within which we live, the involvement of human decision-making is vital, at every stage of computer hardware and software development.

It also makes it essential that, while we may find analogies between human brains and electronic systems assist us in understand them both, we should not push the analogy too far. For instance, Dawkins maintains that the biological genetic code is digital rather than analogue. What does this mean?