Computers and the Mechanics of Communication

Computers have become an integral part of a vast range of coordination patterns among human activities which go far beyond mere calculation. The conceptual relevance of this new field of application of computers has been advocated by Carl Adam Petri (1926–2010) and Anatol W. Holt (1927–2010), two computer scientists best known for their contributions to the subject of Petri nets, a graphical formalism for describing the causal dependence of events in systems distributed in space. We outline some fundamental, mainly epistemological aspects of their vision of the computer as a “communication machine.”