With the aggressive pace of technological change and the onslaught of news regarding data breaches, cyber-attacks, and technological threats to privacy and security, it is easy to assume these are fundamentally new threats. The pace of technological change is slower than it feels, and many seemingly new categories of threats have been with us longer than we remember. Nervous System is a monthly series that approaches issues of data privacy and cyber security from the context of history—to look to the past for clues about how to interpret the present and prepare for the future.
In the 1970s, a seminal figure in the field of computer science set out on an old-media venture of writing a book. As it happened, the disruptions that the Computer Age was bringing to the world of publishing were evident even back then, and they posed an unexpected challenge for this legendary scientist. His solution helped create the notion of freeware and became the industry standard for scientific publishing used to this day.
