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The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see, so Winston Churchill used to say, paraphrasing the old historia est magistra vitae. We all know that but looking back and forward with understanding (and here comes Churchill’s "you can look" and "you are likely to see") we don’t do well, not all of us. Tom Standage does it well. He studied engineering and computer science at Oxford University, has covered science and technology for a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Wired and Prospect, and is now business editor at The Economist. He takes a particular interest in the social and cultural impact of technology and is the author of four books in that line: A History of the World in Six Glasses (2005), The Mechanical Turk (2002), The Neptune File (2000) and The Victorian Internet (1998). Maybe you were amused by The Victorian Internet: The remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century's on-line pioneers. I was not aware of the book, but Standage’s article on telephone-Internet analogy in The Economist caught my attention; notice that the article was written in October of 2001, six years ago, and six Internet years is a long time period. (By the way, did I mention that The Economist is beyond question the best English-language weekly magazine?)
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