This book narrates the development of science, sci/tech, and
intelligence information systems and technologies in the United
States from the beginning of World War II to the second decade of
our century. The story ranges from a description of the information
systems and machines of the 1940s created at Wild Bill Donovan's
predecessors of the Central Intelligence Agency, to the rise of a
huge international science information industry, and to the 1990's
Open Access-Open Culture reformers' reactions to the
commercialization of science information. Necessarily, there is
much about the people, cultures, and politics that shaped the
methods, systems, machines and protests. The reason for that is
simple: The histories of technologies and methods are human
histories. Science information's many lives were shaped by
idiosyncrasies and chance, as well as by social, economic,
political and technical 'forces'. The varied motives, personalities
and beliefs of unique and extraordinary people fashioned science
information's past. The important players ranged from a gentleman
scholar who led the Office of Strategic Services' information work,
to an ill-fated Hollywood movie director, to life-mavericks like
the science information legend Eugene Garfield, to international
financial wheeler-dealers such as Robert Maxwell, and to youthful
ultra-liberal ideologically-driven Silicon Valley internet
millionaires. However, although there are no determining laws of
information history, social, political, legal and economic factors
were important. After 1940, science information's tools and
policies, as well as America's universities, were being molded by
the nation's wealth, its role in international affairs, the
stand-off between left and right politics, and by the intensifying
conflict between Soviet and Western interests.
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