On February 7, 2018, our HIST 390 class discussed what may be considered one of the greatest and most revolutionary of human innovations of our time: the ability to sort, manage, record, and categorize information.  To summarize, during the American Civil War, a man named Montgomery Meigs, who was a quartermaster general, was tasked with managing the North Union army, which included the task of ordering his men’s uniforms for them.  In regards to this, Meigs specifically asked for all of his soldiers to be measured to figure out the minimum sizes for their clothes, and thus ordered clothes around that size in bulk.  Basically, he was able to statistically achieve a solution to what seemed like a tedious and time-consuming endeavor, and solutions such as this would not be the last.  Around this time, IQ tests were made in order to gauge the many soldiers’ level of intelligence (which sadly resulted in the army finding out that the vast majority of their soldiers were at moronic levels of intellect), once again taking what used to be a long and daunting task and simplifying it enough in a way to make it much, much easier and faster.  To a lesser degree, libraries were also beginning to conduct a system in which finding the necessary book was to be made much easier and file cabinets were made to better help manage personal records and files.  In the end, while we may take it all for granted sometimes, the ability to manage data truly revolutionized how we live in the world today.  The Information Revolution had made its mark.

How great the fruits and results of the Information Revolution have been to us!  I remember back in my old university (all the way in Northridge, California) where I went to use a book from a university library for the first time.  Imagine my shock when I was instructed to go up to the information desk, ask for the book, have them search it up within their databases for me, write down the book’s number, and instruct me to look for the aisle that it was placed at.  Even after I understood what I was supposed to do, finding the book in a sea of other books, all with indistinguishable covers and some not even having their titles on their cover, took longer than I was probably comfortable with.  Besides the library number that it was assigned with on the side, there were no other visual cues to rely on, and whenever I finally found a book in that library I always breathed a sigh of relief.  How daunting this task must’ve been if I had been born a few years earlier, in an age where computers were not commonly used enough and where I most likely had to look at each and every book one at a time in order to find what I was looking for.  And speaking of which, how was I supposed to know what I was looking for back then?  There were no computers back then, so how was I supposed to search up the perfect book that I would need in order to write my paper with?  I would have had to look at every book that vaguely mentioned the subject that I was currently working on and skim through it in the hopes that it would have something, anything, that could possibly help me out!  I’ll make sure to remember to count my blessings for being born in this generation, rather than one of the many older ones.