In the previous three articles we talked about three dimensions of heritage: the historical, geographical and thematic. In this article we are going to see how the use of Modern Technology benefited the process of the documentation of heritage, lifting it to a completely new dimension.
Information technology started in the middle of the twentieth century with the invention of the first generation of computers. They were made out of vacuum tubes and were the size of a house. They were only used for storing texts and numbers from which we built database management systems.
A big breakthrough in computer manufacturing then took place through the use of transistors instead of tubes, which reduced the size of the computer tremendously, as did the development of the integrated circuits.
An integrated circuit is a chip containing hundreds of transistors and this particular advancement led to the invention of the personal computer in the early 1980s. A personal computer is a computer owned and used by a single person, unlike the one main-frame computer that was collectively owned and used by several people, mostly professionals, at the same time.
Until the appearance of the personal computer in the 1980s, computers still dealt with text and numbers only. What prevented the use of computers for more than text and numbers at that time was the size of storage available and the speed of processing.
Computers have developed dramatically since then. If we were able to store thousands of characters in the 1980s, we are talking about millions of characters in the 1990s and by 2000 it was billions of characters. That is why, in the early 1990s, computer storage developed the capacity to bear images and sounds in addition to text and numbers in the form of the technology we know today as “Multimedia Technology”.
Also, in the mid-1990s computers became capable of dealing with maps and linking the positions on the maps with the relevant information and images. This is normally known as Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
As the capacity of computers increased still further, it became possible not only to store images and sounds but also to create animated pictures, three-dimensional presentations of buildings and monuments and, more interestingly, virtual visits into different places. This is what we call Virtual Reality technology.
Since the start of the third millennium, the documentation process of different aspects of heritage has taken great leaps forward, thanks to computer technology and to the facilities it has provided such as Database Management Systems, Multimedia Systems, GIS and Virtual Reality Systems. Add to this the rapid developments in the Internet over the past decade, you now have all the cultural and natural heritage of the world at your fingertip.
