The Cybernetics Moment (original) (raw)

institutions who assisted me during the decade and a half I spent researching and writing this book. I especially want to thank Terry Fine and Christina Dunbar-Hester for their advice, assistance, and support over the years. Terry, a professor emeritus in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Cornell University, a friend and colleague whose office was down the hall from mine for many years (in my joint appointment between ECE and the Science and Technology Studies Department in the Arts College), helped me understand the basic principles of information theory, discussed the often testy relationships between that field and cybernetics during his career, and critiqued my account of the field he loves. As a Ph.D. student in science and technology studies, Christina, now an assistant professor at Rutgers University, served as a sounding board and friendly critic of the ideas in this book when she was at Cornell, particularly when she took my seminar on cybernetics and helped me teach an undergraduate course on the history of information technology. In combing through the massive Warren McCulloch Papers at the American Philosophical Society as a research assistant, Christina deepened the research for the book at a critical time. Her comments on several chapters were insightful. I would also like to thank other former students for their research assistance: Alec Shuldiner, for finding material on the development of information theory in the extensive AT&T archives; Albert Tu, for copying newspaper and magazine articles on cybernetics and information theory; Lav Varshney, for researching the acceptance of information theory in American electrical engineering journals and for alerting me to obscure published sources on Claude Shannon; and Daniel Kreiss at Stanford University, for gathering material on NASA's cyborg project at the Ames Research Center. Thanks also to Glen Bugos at NASA, for helping navigate the Ames Research Center archives, and to Rachel Prentice at Cornell and David Hounshell at Carnegiex Acknowledgments Mellon University, for providing copies of archival material from their own research. Rick Johnson at Cornell and Julian Reitman, a former officer of the IEEE Society on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, shared their recollections of that society in the 1960s and 1970s. The late Dick Neisser, a founder of cognitive psychology, painted a vivid picture for me of information studies in the 1950s. In addition to Terry and Christina, I wish to thank Bill Aspray,