On 22 September 2026, Computer Weekly turns 60. To mark the milestone, we asked some of our friends – experts, parliamentarians, IT leaders and suppliers, as well as our journalists – for their perspectives on how tech has changed their lives over six decades. What’s changed the most for you since then?
In the beginning was the word. The term “IT” begins with the word that drew me into covering an industry of which I knew very little in 1997 – the word is “information”.
For information management has been the compass by which I have navigated the foreign waves and shores of IT – the industry and market.
From 2002 till 2010 I deviated somewhat into the field of information security, as the programme editor for Elsevier’s computer security journals, then as the launch editor, in 2004, of that publisher’s iteration of Infosecurity magazine.
But even that foray into what is today, pretentiously, called “cyber security” was about the information being secured, first and foremost. Cryptography goes back to 1500 BC – there is nothing new under the sun.
I started out my post-undergraduate career not as an IT journalist, but as an English literature academic, first as a graduate student, then as a British Academy post-doctoral researcher and junior research Fellow, at Oxford – first at Wadham College (famous for the rakish Earl of Rochester and the brilliant Labour leader Michael Foot) and then at Wolfson College (famous for Isaiah Berlin, its first president). I’d be very proud to be associated with all three of those lads.
My fields were politics in literature in the 1930s/1940s and the 1890s/1900s. To cut a long story short, I wrote about the novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton, and the Scottish writer and politician R. B. Cunninghame Graham.
As a lexicographical assistant at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), I did come across the application of computers. The OED was an early user of Open Text’s information storage and retrieval technology. And I did acquire an Apple Mac to word process when I started my post-doc. Otherwise, I was innocent of IT – until the internet.
Eye popping
I had to get an email address to keep in touch with my girlfriend, who went to Australia on a research trip, in 1992. And then I discovered the web, in 1994, thanks to someone who knew about computers. It was eye-popping.
By 1997, just as Tony Blair was coming to power, I had run out of public money to finance my academic “career” and had wangled a job with an Oxford based publishing company, Oxford Open Learning, as commissioning editor for its ambitious project to publish PhDs electronically.
“ Many of the techniques associated with modern IT systems go way back – metadata-like classification, indexing, summarisation, information retrieval aids and so on, pre-date not just the internet, but the printing press”
Brian McKenna
I got the project going and then accepted a job as the in-house editor of two fine information science journals, The Electronic Library and Online & CD-ROM Review. Those were published by a VNU subsidiary, Learned Information (LI), which also published Information World Review (IWR) and Knowledge Management (KM) magazine.
I became the editor of first KM then IWR before joining the web-based VNUnet in more mainstream IT industry publishing – rather than in the online information industry of LI, which pre-dated the web, and featured such titans as Dialog and LexisNexis.
The rest of my professional story can be followed on LinkedIn, but I want to dwell a little on the theme of managing information in the epoch of “too much to know”.
Too much to know
There is a terrific book on this topic, from 2010, with that title, by Ann M. Blair, with the sub-title, Managing scholarly information before the modern age. In it she scotches the easy cliché about the Renaissance invention of information overload, with the advent of the printing press.
Human beings have been managing information for many centuries – long before the west European mechanised printing press got going, through Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century.
Scholars had “developed techniques for selecting, sorting, and storing information on a large scale”, according to her book, long before the modern era – for historians the modern era does not begin with Mod, but rather begins around 1450-ish. And Blair’s book does examine the impact of printing in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries for information management.
Her particular focus is on a long-running tradition in information management, “the collection and arrangement of textual excerpts designed for consultation in … ‘reference books’.”
Her challenge to the lazy assumption that information overload is uniquely a product of the internet is bracing to those of us whose education and formation lies in the humanities, not in computer science. She shows that many of the techniques associated with modern IT systems go way back – metadata-like classification, indexing, summarisation, information retrieval aids and so on, pre-date not just the internet, but the printing press.
The advent of GenAI
But printing did make a massive difference. And the advent of generative AI (GenAI), in late 2022, has made a massive difference to information management over the past few years. Indeed, many of the dreams of late 1990s KM – conceptualising organisations as if endowed with collective brains, capturing tacit knowledge, and so on – have been given new life by GenAI, and now agentic AI. What an age we live in.
With a background in managing library and information science journals and in editing Knowledge Management magazine as well as (briefly) Information World Review, I felt that I came at more traditional IT publications such as Computer Weekly with fresh eyes and a distinctive angle. That background also helped me navigate the terrain of information security with a bit more assurance.
I also carry baggage from my days – well, 10 or so years – as a junior English literature academic, drawing on very particular theoretical traditions, mostly historical materialist; that helps with understanding the economic history of the technology industry also. I like to think I wear that lightly. But it does help when, as a Computer Weekly journalist, one is engaged intellectually in interviews with C-level IT industry executives to have what that redoubtable Labour politician Denis Healey used to famously call a “hinterland”.