One can see Manovich’s argument becoming true in the development of database technology the 20th century. The first commercially available computer databases were organized hierarchically. If you wanted to get to a particular piece of information, you went to the overarching category and made a series of choices as…
In the theory of forms, Plato posits that there were these things called "forms," and a form is basically an abstract concept that represents some sort of object that exists. Then these objects were basically some sort of particular thing that has form-ness of some kind. So you can almost think of this as like a class…
Consider some fundamental names: Turing (computation theory and programmable automata), von Neumann (computer architecture), Shannon (information theory), Knuth, Hoare, Dijkstra, and Wirth (programming theory and algorithmics), Feigenbaum and McCarthy (artificial intelligence), Codd (relational model of databases)…