cryptography:
It is the study of encryption, the art/science to create and use codes and/or ciphers with the purpose of enciphering as well as deciphering.
After a relatively vivid but slow development of cryptography for nearly 4.000 years the inventions of the telegraph, radio and computer had a high impact on the velocity of further inventions concerning encryption.
Most of the time economic, political or military reasons lie behind the necessity of encryption. As visible from the timetable cryptography it is also done for private and individual interests. An extraordinary example for this is the Braille Code, developed as a possibility for blind people to read and write.
A lot of very interesting and intelligent websites about cryptography can be found in the Internet.Some websites offering links to various cryptography-websites are:
Further there exists a wide range of web-magazines/newsletters/mailing lists on cryptography, e.g.:
Crypto-Gram Newsletter:
Journal of Computer Security:
Cypherpunks:
Stegano-L:
ZD Internet Magazine:
TEXTBLOCK 1/1 // URL: http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611776/100438659057
Writing and calculating came into being at about the same time. The first pictographs carved into clay tablets are used for administrative purposes. As an instrument for the administrative bodies of early empires, who began to rely on the collection, storage, processing and transmission of data, the skill of writing was restricted to a few. Being more or less separated tasks, writing and calculating converge in today's computers.
Letters are invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent, says Saint Augustine. The invention of writing made it possible to transmit and store information. No longer the ear predominates; face-to-face communication becomes more and more obsolete for administration and bureaucracy. Standardization and centralization become the constituents of high culture and vast empires as Sumer and China.