概述 人类自其诞生至今,已极大地改进了他们获得信息并传递给他人的方法,使之日臻复杂。进入二十世纪以来,印刷文字——书籍、报纸、杂志——是人类保存和传播事实、思想和创造发明的主要手段。嗣后,电报、电话、广播和电视普遍地得到了应用,更便利了人们相互间的交流与信息的传播。 如今,无线电通讯发展神速,以致莫尔斯电报也几乎成了史前时期的古董。人们用电磁和电子光学的手段控制着图象的传播。正是这些技术在应用过程中互相交融,才产生了诸如“无线电通讯信息学”(Telematica)这样新的体系。 根据研究这方面问题的专家、学者的观点,工业世界正在向后工业社会的方向变化。那里居支配地位的活动已不再是物质资料的生产和消费,起决定性作用的将是服务业、知识产业和信息。 全世界的文献资料不仅仅只储存在大型图书馆里。今天,电子计算机的数据库储存了各种内容的文字和数字信息。用户通过电缆、光导纤维和卫星电路就能够立即从远距离得到它们。设在家里、办公室或学校的终端设备,使得人们能够同信息库进行对话。 Overview Since its inception, humans have greatly improved the way they access information and deliver it to others, making it increasingly complicated. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, printing of texts - books, newspapers and magazines - has been the main means for mankind to preserve and disseminate facts, ideas and inventions. Subsequently, telegraph, telephone, radio and television were generally used, which facilitated the exchange of people and the dissemination of information. Today, the rapid development of radio communications, Morse telegraph has almost become a prehistoric antiques. People use electromagnetic and electro-optical means to control the spread of the image. It is these technologies that blend in with each other to create new systems such as Telematica. According to the experts and scholars who have studied this issue, the industrial world is changing in the direction of a backward industrial society. The dominating activities there are no longer the production and consumption of material information, but the decisive ones will be the service industries, knowledge industries and information. The world’s literature is not just stored in large libraries. Today, the electronic computer’s database stores a variety of textual and numerical information. Users can get them from long distances via cables, fiber optic cables and satellite circuits. Terminal equipment at home, in the office or at school allows people to talk to the repository.