Signals

September 17, 2009
Stacey Mason

Dan Bricklin has posted a new essay to his website entitled “Signals and the Ubiquity of New Carriers”. Bricklin created VisiCalc, the first computer program for making spreadsheets.

"Entire capital and distribution infrastructure may be quickly obsoleted when a major type of signal starts switching to be more commonly carried by a different type of carrier. The quality and price improvements they may have been working on may have little sway against the desirability of totally different attributes of the new carriers. Signal producers often give little thought to the fact that adding a new carrier may cause demand for the services of one of their carriers to drop.”

The article focuses on changing technologies, past and present, examining their impact on the way we receive information. Looking at the article from the standpoint of a young, technologically-dependent art form, it’s interesting to envision where hypertext literature may go in the coming years.

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