Homage to ICT

In 1984-85 I wrote a Biology Textbook and Teacher’s Guide using a typewriter and the limited set of references that were available in the South Sudan at that time.

In 1985/86 I wrote a set of dissertations using Locoscript on an Amstrad PCW, and the resource materials available as hard copy in the University of Sussex.

From the late 1980s onwards my word processing was by Word Perfect and then MS Word - and my research was limited to what was locally available in Portsoy, Belize and Lesotho.

The move from typewriter to word processor was a sudden, radical and greatly appreciated technological innovation. But the computer was a large standalone box that took up a lot of space on my physical desktop.  This hard technology problem was to be solved by first laptops and now tablets.

But – the real earth shattering innovation was online access to the internet. For me this happened in the late 90s and it has been growing ever since. This morning, however, I noticed that I take a huge amount of stuff for granted. So this blogpost is my homage to a few individuals and organizations whose visionary technology have facilitated and changed how I work and play in the knowledge industry.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google (1998)
"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and "Don't be evil".

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia (2001)
“the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit.”

Chris Anderson of TED (2001)
“Fostering the spread of great ideas”