Technological game changers

[AndyT]

Well, if we're going back a bit, then I nominate the bicycle at the beginning of the C20th, when it became affordable to ordinary people.

It's often said that by increasing the range in which rural dwellers could find marriage partners it visibly affected the gene pool, leading directly to an increase in average height. It was a big force in the emancipation of women and it also gave a spur to metalworking and manufacturing techniques, making possible the later development of the car and the aeroplane.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

What surprises me is the number of things that have been invented and designed that were world changing................that have come and gone without my ever using or owning them.

 

[cambournepete]

The move from mainframe to personal computers was the game-changer. Everything since has been incremental development, including the intrduction of tablets and such which.

And now with the web and cloud storage we're almost back with mainframes...

 

[bugbear]

The move from mainframe to personal computers was the game-changer. Everything since has been incremental development, including the intrduction of tablets and such which.

And now with the web and cloud storage we're almost back with mainframes...

Certainly the micro-computer revolution, where users wrote their own software, and took back control from the IT department, appears to be well and truly over.

It turns out writing good software is hard.

BugBear

 

[Kalimna]

I think that the thing with iPod (and ipad) is that although they weren't the first (the Archos as mentioned, and MS had a tablet a long time before Apple) to market, they were the first with mass market appeal. In that way they are certainly game changers. In a similar fashion, when MS brought out and bundled DOS with IBM they ushered computers into the homes of many people who would not have been able to otherwise and thusly started the software-hardware 'battle' that has gone ever since. Windows is the same - apple may have been there first (and arguably done it better), but MS allowed essentially everyone to own a GUI computer and with Apple it would always have been a niche market of creative types.

Other game changers? The solid state transistor absolutely. But what about the WWW? Obviously the Internet (and piggybacked WWW) was not the first network of distributed computers (DARPAnet and Telnet spring to mind), but again it allowed mass market use.
CCD and the evolution of with regard to photography. What percentage of photos are taken on film now?

Adam

 

[RogerS]

Well, if we're going back a bit, then I nominate the bicycle at the beginning of the C20th, when it became affordable to ordinary people.

It's often said that by increasing the range in which rural dwellers could find marriage partners it visibly affected the gene pool, leading directly to an increase in average height. It was a big force in the emancipation of women and it also gave a spur to metalworking and manufacturing techniques, making possible the later development of the car and the aeroplane.

Now that I like!

 

[RogerS]

What surprises me is the number of things that have been invented and designed that were world changing................that have come and gone without my ever using or owning them.

We need names ! We need names !

 

[Gary Morris]

how far back we going, cause some old gezzer in the cave next door said he's invented something called the wheel, don't think it'll catch on though

 

[clivethecarpenter]

Cordless drills ..........................

 

[Graham Orm]

Cordless drills ..........................

I was once called a lazy b****** for putting a Yankee screwdriver bit in a powered drill......long before cordless drills came along.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

how far back we going, cause some old gezzer in the cave next door said he's invented something called the wheel, don't think it'll catch on though

Well, it won't until he invents another one.

 

[Eric The Viking]

I grew up in a technology-driven household, as my dad was an electronics designer from the 1940s through to the 1990s. He still can't leave it alone. He's just bought himself a Taiwanese digital oscilloscope (and is complaining about the quality). I have two excellent scopes he designed in the 1960s and rebuilt from time to time throughout his career. He's 84.

The family saw a range of amazing things when I was a child. I have a photo of Jodrell Bank, taken on holiday, when I was seven or eight. We didn't know how to get there and he and I climbed over lots of gates and waded through (to me) waist-high grass to get near enough. But I printed it myself with his help - it was magic

Other special memories are when he came home with a present for myself and a schoolfriend: a single, red LED each. We were amazed at the "cold" light - no filaments to burn out, hardly any current required - amazing.

I had a holiday job in the factory where he worked in 1975, and remember being allowed to play with one of the first gas* lasers, putting a red dot on the roof beams on the far side of the building - amazing. I remember a "pocket" calculator, with hand-wired circuit boards and little lenses over the digits. It never had a case, and the 'keypad' was a sheet of paper with the numbers written on it. It did square roots, but you had to 'calculate' PI. He used it for years.

We played with shortwave radios, radio controlled models, the first microprocessor kits (Lunar Lander on the Nascom 1, anyone?), and he designed synthesizers and electronic organs commercially for a few years. The neighbours got used to really weird noises drifting out on the summer air (when his south-facing study had to have the windows open). Want to talk like a Dalek? We could!

There was always something new and unusual at home, either to play with or _not_ to play with! In the winter of three-day-weeks, we stayed warm, as he built an inverter to run the gas boiler during the power cuts, coupled with a string of 12V car bulbs for light. He gave me the latest version last week-end ("in case you need it"), complete with extra hand-wound coils on the toroidal transformer.

There's a lot more, but the technology moment that really stands out is those LEDs. I was only about ten or eleven, and Armstrong and Aldrin had come back from the moon a year earlier, but it was those little red lights that made me realise that high-technology really could change the everyday world as I understood it. And it has.

E.

*gas, I think - it might have been ruby. We tried to make it go the following summer, but it hadn't been used in the interim and wouldn't lase any more.

 

[Mr_P]

This child of the seventies who dabbled with BBC micros at school and a Vic 20 at home regards the arrival of the 16 bit generation in the mid 80's as the biggest leap of my lifetime to date.

My Atari ST was launched in 1985 and 28 years later I'm a tad dissapointed at the lack of progress.

It had a mouse, windows based user interface and later upgrades included a hard drive, cd-rom and a modem long before www days.

 

[John51]

The refrigerator.

In the days before every household had a fridge, that home needed a 'homemaker' as shopping needed to be done almost every day. No womens lib without a fridge. All the home makers met at the local shop, gossip exchanged, community bonds etc. etc.

No mens lib without the microwave oven.

wrt silicon, the Science of Cambridge MK14. Offered as a kit with a whopping great 256b of ram, yes a quarter of a Kb. The high number of sales, yes I was a customer, encouraged Uncle Clive to produce the Sinclair Spectrum. Once we got used to having a computer in our home, the rest is history.

e2a: The fax: the machine that killed the Soviet empire. You can give all the unemployed jobs as a spy and have them listen to phone calls but you can't give all of them a fax machine. (Well not at the time.) it was the fax machine that enabled the world to learn about Chernobyl.

 

[monkeybiter]

The fax was a long time maturing, having been invented/patented/working long before the last Tsar was shot, let alone the death of the USSR.

The MK14 lead to the ZX80, my first comp. [still got it]. I remember Sir Clive saying the only thing limiting the reduction in size of a computer was the keyboard.... smart phones

You make an interesting point about the decline of the 'homemaker' community. I think the relentless disappearance British Pub is/will have a similar detrimental effect on society, as everybody sits at home watching other people sitting at home watching the telly. The logical conclusion of that lifestyle is that we all become a mere money conduit for the transfer of funds from our employer to a reducing number of enlarging retail businesses.

 

[RogerS]

......

e2a: The fax: the machine that killed the Soviet empire. You can give all the unemployed jobs as a spy and have them listen to phone calls but you can't give all of them a fax machine. (Well not at the time.) it was the fax machine that enabled the world to learn about Chernobyl.

I don't believe that it was the fax machine but that penetration of telephone lines within the populus. Seem to remember reading that once a level of 5% has been reached then it is difficult for any regime to stay in power if the populus don't want it to.

 

[RogerS]

....
You make an interesting point about the decline of the 'homemaker' community. I think the relentless disappearance British Pub is/will have a similar detrimental effect on society, as everybody sits at home watching other people sitting at home watching the telly. The logical conclusion of that lifestyle is that we all become a mere money conduit for the transfer of funds from our employer to a reducing number of enlarging retail businesses.

Or people spend all their time peering into a tiny mobile screen busily texting and facebooking rather than picking up the phone and actually speaking!

 

[monkeybiter]

The 'phone's all right but if you must talk to people nothing beats seeing the hairs on their nose and smelling the eau de sapien under the parfum de prat, if you can see the flaws you've got proof we're all the same and all equal.

 

[Lons]

Cordless drills ..........................

I was once called a lazy b****** for putting a Yankee screwdriver bit in a powered drill......long before cordless drills came along.

:lol: :lol: Me too...but it was a disaster not to be repeated as the drill didn't have soft start, the bit spun out of the screw and chewed the door edge whioch meant an hours work to repair the damage. #-o

Bob

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I found the steel in the Yankee bits too hard - when I tried it , the "wings" on the pozidrive bit just cracked straight off.