DOCUMENTS: FROM THEN TO TOMORROW 

From the days of the Rosetta Stone and the tied knots of the Incas, through the Magna Carta and the American Declaration of Independence, to Arthur C. Clarke's concept of artificial satellites we have moved from clay, to thread, to skin or parchment to Gutenberg paper. That allowed almost everyone to become a reader. Brought to us today, courtesy of Xerox, are billions of documents in every conceivable size, color, quality and quantity. This has allowed almost everyone to become a publisher. Tomorrow such documents will appear as practically indestructible optical discs, smaller than a postage stamp and capable of handling tens of billions of bits of information.

It was not always thus. Our first solid evidence of man's ability to pass on the knowledge of the day in written, translatable form via a "document" to his culture, is believed to be from the period between 203 B.C. and 181 B.C. (verified through the technology of carbon dating). The riddle of reading hieroglyphics was solved by Frenchman Jean Francois Champolion, when in 1799 he started translating from the black basalt stone similar passages written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and Demotic, the popular language of Egypt at the time and Greek. For the first time we learned "history" in other than an oral sense.

Incan "documents" or records were mainly knots, known as quipu strings. The color and number of each strand of string, and the number of knots kept track of elaborate accounts, quantities of wheat and other grain and holdings of the southern Sun Kings during the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. The knots served as "memory triggers" and enabled the Incas to with count into the thousands. With no written language until the Spaniards under Pizarro introduced Latin, the Incas reigned over all their known world. Suspecting that was all there was they remained aloof and confident they were in total control of the universe, until the Spaniards arrived in 1532. Not knowing how to handle such overwhelming changes, as men on horseback which they thought was all one animal, the Incas, in effect froze and died of fright.

The Magna Carta document, signed under duress by King John in 1215, became the cornerstone of English liberty. It gave man an in-writing guarantee not to be treated as slaves, ensured that taxes could only be collected by legal means and that justice could not be sold or denied, laying the foundation for the writ of habeus corpus and ensuring that no man could be imprisoned or have property taken from him without legal trial.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776 ensured rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", for all Americans. It ushered in the separation of the original 13 colonies from England. Since that time variations of its theme have been introduced in many lands.

Arthur C. Clarke's technical treatise in the October, 1945 issue of Britain's WIRELESS WORLD, introduced the modern form of prophetic document -- Gutenberg print in a magazine. These five documents not only represented their times and new technologies in record keeping, but most importantly, had a long term effect on almost everybody in the civilized world.

The definition of "document" is still changing. From stone tablet, to string, to goatskin parchment, to linen paper to pressed wood pulp. Change continues. Now microfiche film, magnetic audio and Hi-8, 500line-resolution video tape, magnetic computer discs and optical storage cards the size of a credit card that hold the equivalent of 20,000 pages of single-spaced typewritten information bring us to the modern marketplace.

Tomorrow we will all be reading photonic magazines published on 4.5inch optical discs that can hold 600,000,000 bytes of information -the equivalent of a thousand, 300-page books -- that can be read to the illiterate, in the old Gutenberg sense. The day-after-tomorrow images will appear (in some cases, this technology is already here using some of the latest Xerox equipment -- but the cost is still high for popular usage). Many such images will never be printed out on paper, just ingested intellectually and/or moved on, as is or with modification, to others who may or may not print them out in an older format. What will be the available to the techno-aristocrat in society will be the knowledge of the world at the push of a button or even through projection of a thought wave!

Coming up in the immediate future, SERODS (Surface-Enhanced Optical Data Storage) will enable us to put the entire contents of a large city library onto one or two 12-inch optical discs, each capable of holding one million 300-page books from the Gutenberg era. The knowledge of the world on the head of a pin is no longer that far out. In Cambridge, England, an electron tunneling microscope has already put the 29 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica on such a pin head -- and still leaving ample room for angels to dance.

* * *

< previous | chapter index | next >
back to Main Chapter Listing
back to Home Page