Week 2 Lecture

I enjoyed the lecture, this course is easily becoming one of my favorites’ simply because I have a heavy personnel interest in the ideology of 'cyberspace' and how its evolving at such a fast pace (and how far it has gone since it was nicked from the U.S. Military). While I personally knew about the works of the 'forefathers of computing', with Turing's philosophy on Artificial Intelligence being used to this day in robotics, I didn't really know the history behind him nor others before him. While I was well aware of Turing and the later Bill Gates etc, they stood more as a name to me rather than actual people because I hadn't really bothered to see or read about their history, which gave me a greater understanding of who they were.

One thing I did not expect was the fact that the idea of a mechanical computer actually existed (and apparently did literally exist in some shape or form), I had no idea that a complex machine such as this would have arisen as early as the late 18th century. But as stated in the Lecture, the industrial revolution and the years after it were the ‘golden age of invention’, which I guess is where the idea of ‘Steam Punk’ comes from.

To sum it all up, I think the lecture was cut short as we clearly didn’t get through it all but regardless of this it remained interesting to me because I enjoy the idea of a sort of ‘philosophy’ of the internet or foundations even.