Claude Shannon died last week at a nursing home in Massachusetts. At 84, his mind — once so great — was clouded by Alzheimer's Disease, so in a sense I suppose it was only Shannon's body that died, but that, too, is a passage. For those who don't know about Shannon, he was the father of information theory, which in its simplest form means he made possible the leap from telephones and telegraphs to computers. In 1938, when he was a graduate student at MIT, Shannon came up with the idea of messages having information value, and that value could be encoded in a binary signal and sent down the wire. This was for his master's thesis. Where Morse encoded the alphabet and Bell replicated at a distance electrical wave forms, Shannon proposed taking just the raw information that could represent sound or video or the Declaration of Independence as either a text document or a historic artifact. His was a giant advancement in communication.

I knew Claude Shannon, not well, but I knew him. We met a few times because I have made a point of trying to meet my heroes whenever possible. Our only substantive conversation that I can recall was about juggling, a hobby he did well and I can't do at all. But if Shannon wanted to talk about juggling, heck, we'd talk about juggling. (It's no accident that many computer folk like juggling. It's in their genes.)

Shannon was a juggler, a puzzle solver, a cryptographer of epic skill. He helped win the war, you know, by applying his brain to the cracking of Axis radio transmissions while working at AT&T Bell Labs. We owe the guy a lot.

This is a peculiar time in the history of computing. Each year, as a Shannon or a Licklider fades from view, we lose a little more of the sense of curiosity and whimsy that got us where we are today. It is very difficult for me to come up with a historical parallel for this loss of connection with the past. What I want to say is that it's like the automobile industry must have been in 1950 except that's not true. Cars, while amazing machines, aren't computers, and the men and women who made cars possible — well, they weren't like Shannon or Turing. Cars function in a physical world, carrying kids to school and crops to market, while computers and computer networks function in a digital world with few laws and fewer limits, carrying ideas to school and markets to crops.

There was no reason, back in 1938, for Claude Shannon to start thinking about information, to invent the concept of a data channel, to choose binary encoding. He just made it all up in his mind and changed the world by doing so. There was little that could be done with these ideas back then, yet he thought them up anyway. We owe the guy a lot.

Today, things are different. The auto industry analogy that I couldn't apply to Shannon in 1938 actually applies quite well to the world of computing today. That's because what was an area of interest has become an industry. And not just any industry, it's an industry so big and so important that it simultaneously drives our economy and enables it to function. Computing is serious business, serious money -� too serious to afford the very behavior that made its existence possible. What companies still engage in basic research and really mean it? Hardly any. This may be reality, but it is not a good reality.

Progress is important, but why must it so often involve the abandonment of heritage? I am guilty of this, too. For my show "Triumph of the Nerds," I did an extensive interview with Doug Engelbart that never made it to the final edit. Engelbart invented the mouse, the graphical interface, interactive computing, and many of the networking notions we've turned into big business today. Most of this stuff came to him, literally in a dream, in the early 1950s. Engelbart was Shannon's equal and Engelbart is still very much alive. Yet because of time constraints and the story arc and who knows what else, that interview we did in 1995 will probably never be seen. People will know what Engelbart did, but they'll have less of a sense of what he was like and of why he did it.

We have to do a better job of preserving this heritage while most of it is still here to be preserved. But I don't see it happening. We do a fair job, I suppose, of putting machines on display and perhaps emulating their programs on more modern systems. Or do we? What happened to the Computer Museum in Boston? Why does the Tech Museum in San Jose completely ignore history in favor of entertainment? But even the best museum can do little to preserve emotions. We do an especially poor job of remembering the way things were and how excited we were to do what had never been done before. Those emotions can only come from the pioneers, themselves, and those pioneers are fewer than they were.

Viewers and readers come to me almost every week with good ideas for future documentaries, but there simply isn't money to make them. You'd think companies would invest in preserving their own histories but they don't. Apple Computer gave away its archives to save money. So we're left with an image of Claude Shannon that I fear will be forever incomplete. What was the man really like? He did what? That's amazing! And you say he also invented the rocket-powered Frisbee? (He did.)

We owe the guy a lot.