Quote:
Originally Posted by ncole1
What's new about placing orders with a machine?
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This. This is what you fail to grasp.
Computing have been around for a thousand years or more, a computer was literally someone sitting at a desk 'computing' at a certain time in history. It is not that the CPU was invented or that Turing made his famous 'bomb' or mechanic calculators, it is about that computing is on an exponential trend.
Biotech is on an exponential trend.
Information technology is on an exponential trend.
The list goes on.
We can debate about what part of what subsystem broke down in the 1990:s (say superheat in projected CPU:s), that is interesting and all but history shows us that when one thing stops working, humanity finds another.
Oh no! we hit a wall, vacuum tubes just can't be smaller!
We hit a wall, litography just can't go below 5000nm!
we hit a wall, 4nm is the end!
You get the idea. Or actually you doesn't seem to.
Maybe it is easier for someone that has actually lived the thing, I don't know.
If someone had told me I'd have a start-trek like hand held computer where I could listen to any music, see any film call any person for almost free I would not have believed them in say 1985.
Then came Napster, then came the smartphone, then came Youtube... and here it is, like it had always been here!
Not like you have to bike downtown to by a friggin expensive plastic disc where the signature of sound waves have been pressed into it so you could put a tiny stick in that valley, turn the disc and listen to music.
Information? Go to the library and try to find something interesting (tough luck), wait until you learn it in school? You needed to do a whole career just to get to the base information in one domain! TV? Yeah that was really filled with useful information. Guess Radio was the best but still, there was like this one show at 23h00 every sunday... missed it? Sorry for you it's gone.
When I got my C64, I got my hands on some opcodes (machine code), but no one did a selective jump, so I spent months writing self modifying code, just because I didn't know there was or how it worked.
That was how it was to live in the eighties.
Today, we truly live in another world.
The thing is that with all those technologies and the expansion of communication (2.3billion people on the internet), the changes are coming faster and faster.
I have felt this a long time (the computer race was actually breaking people in the industry, one console/pc/mobile/GPU or whatever came out, two years later a new came out, then it was every year, then it was every 6 month. Keep up!).
Tomorrow we'll have even more changes, more and more and more. It is even starting to be hard to keep track of all the news about technology, 20 years ago you'd buy a magazine about the latest things every year, today there is several a day, you'd need a magazine like in the old days but every week and soon every day...
So, it doesn't matter if some part breaks down, humanity always find a way around it and this exponential trend will continue. and continue. and continue.