A little more than a decade into the new century, people over the age of 35 in the industrialized countries are increasingly conscious of living in a world that is profoundly and fundamentally different from that into which many of them were born. In less than two decades, we have seen technological, economic, political and cultural change on a scale which, as a retrospective view becomes possible, is beginning to justify the use of the word ‘revolution’ to describe it. But revolution is a word that we associate with violence, with the storming of the Bastille or the bombardment of the Winter Palace. The 1990s were indeed a violent decade in some places, but our revolution was only indirectly a part of that. It began in the 1970s and is not yet complete; it has been at once less obvious and more far-reaching than a mere change in a regime or even in a whole political system. It has been a revolution in our way of living, which, in one way or another, has affected every human being on the planet.

The symbol of the revolution is the computer, the ‘electronic brain’ of the ‘boffins’ in science fiction films of two or three generations ago, which now seem far older than their 50 or 60 years. The computer is in every office, on most desks and in millions of homes. Behind the scenes it is involved in almost everything we do, from buying our groceries to making a telephone call. Even after more than a century of almost continuous innovation in the technology of communication, and the invention of devices from the telegraph and the telephone to the television, the computer is perceived, however vaguely, as being in some way different. By understanding that difference, we can begin to understand the new society which the computer is helping to create, the revolution which it has both inspired and driven.

It is now two centuries since the last comparable revolution was at its height in Britain. The exploitation of the power of steam was creating a new economy, and in so doing reordering patterns of work, social relationships and the structure and political organization of society. The new arrangements which stabilized in the first half of the 19th century were recognizably the successor of what had gone before, but unmistakably different from it.