The Web, the Home and the Search Engine

When, in Eric Hobsbawm’s account, the ‘short 20 century’ ended with the fall of the iron curtain in 1991 (Hobsbawm 1994), the revolution in information and communication technologies was just getting into its stride. On the back of such nineteenth century inventions as photography, typewriters, telephones, telegraph, radio, recorded sound, and the punched-card sorting machine, as well as popular publishing, the spread of universal education and services such as public libraries and the postal system, the first half of the twentieth saw a huge expansion of our information horizons. Broadcast radio, film and television became sources of information available to everyone, in addition to newspapers, magazines, and cheaply produced books. For person-to-person communication, the rapidly-expanding telephone system (increasingly based on automatic exchanges) added to the postal service which had reached its apogee around the turn of the century. In business, large scale data processing based on punched cards was making inroads into previously clerical domains. And in the second world war, the demands of the code-cracking community pushed onwards towards the computer.