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Technologies that Have Exceeded Their Expectations?
drfunch asks: "With the recent 'passing' of Pioneer 10 after over 30 years of service, I wonder what other technologies have far exceeded expectations. One example from my own experience is my trusty HP calculator, which is still going strong after 21 years. What technologies or devices have gone far beyond your expectations?"
The paper-ballot voting booth -- worked just fine for over 200 years...and then, one major screw-up in one state and everything goes to shit. Go figure.
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Still going strong after all these years, in some form or another.
This is a pretty obvious one, but I think Linux has surpassed everyone's expectations, esp. those who knew about it in it's earlier stages. I'm sure Linus never expected it to become so huge, as well as a posterboy for the OSS movement.
My other sig is funny!
The design is very much the same as it was 100 years ago and, with the exception of fuel injection and emissions "add-ons", has changed very little in the last 50 years. With some of the V8 engines, manufacturers have been using the same block design for decades.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Always remember the immortal rule of tech support: You couldn't do their job, don't expect them to do yours.
I remember when I was working as a summer intern doing desktop support for a rather large construction & engineering company. I was tagging along with a full-timer, and we walked into a rather large office where the guy I was with remarked "Heh-heh, you're gonna love this guy..stupid fool needed help defragging his HD".
Then I noticed on the wall he had a PHD in physics. Kind of humbled me right there and I realized he could probably learn my job in a month, where as I probably couldn't do his in a million years.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
It started off just being a simple language for describing academic documents. Now you can plug so much junk into HTML that you can create whole applications. HTML is bursting at the seams because of all these hacks and extra languages tacked on to the end, but it still works. I think that's amazing.
I don't use floppies for much more than install disks for linux anymore, so pretty much any disk I have rotting in the closet is fair game for a reformatting to serve as a boot disk. I've gone through stacks of disks, one goes bad, I toss it out and pick the next one on the stack.. except for this one ancient maxell floppy I have.
;)
I used it back when my parents got their 486 (in the early 90's) for holding windows 3.11, it was an OEM release and the first time you loaded the machine it prompted you through swapping disks to copy out recovery disks.
This disk has followed me in moving about the country four times now, it's gone from alaska to oregon to new jersey to california to illinois. Currently it's a boot disk for redhat 7.1, and I use it at work several times a week.
No it's not a 20 year old calculator, but considering most claim floppy disks have two year lifespans, the fact this is STILL my most reliable floppy makes it interesting. It even has the original "Windows 3.11 disk 8" label I wrote up for it on it, scribbled out. Underneath it is written "slackware #1" and "redhat boot".
They really don't make 'em like they used to.
They're pretty cool if you think about it. A whole bunch of ink that rolls out onto the paper over a tiny little ball. If you remember to keep the cap on and don't leave it on the dashboard of your car in the sun, it doesn't leak. And you can buy 12 for $1.00 at the office supply store, which if you didn't lose them all in a month would be a lifetime supply.
Over 50 years after it was introduced, it's still in use...with a few slight changes of course.
The Aloha based system was not supposed to scale. The problem pointed out by IBM / TI and others were that collisons increased as the useage increased, prohibiting a steady throughput. The problem of non predictability of packages was equally mentioned.
Token ring and other methods were supposed to supplant Ethernet in a few years, back when we were at 1Mbps.
10Mbps were supposed to be the EOL for ethernet.
Where are we now? 10Gbps is getting to be deployed.
Help fight continental drift.
Why Unix and C ofcourse ! Its really amazing that the creativity of one man (oh well, two men) is still going strong now (granted it had many overhauls). The entire concept of operating system has been influenced by Unix. We think processes and files. The beautiful simplicity and elegance! As far as C is concerned, the syntax and the semantics is elegant. (So elegant that I place semicolons at the end of sentences rather than a period).
Seriously! Given the number of times the "death of the paper document" was predicted
and the amount of "paperless office" ideas floated,
one must say that there is still nothing like good old hardcopy.
In fact, computers have increased the amount of paper used.
A rep. for a paper-mill I once visited said that the laser printer was the best thing that ever happened to them.
Computers are great for distribution. But they've got a long way to go
if they want to beat paper at (text) presentation.
When microwaves first came out, people thought of them as a new way of cooking the same old foods, quicker. Nice, but not earth-shattering. Since then, though, microwaves have spawned a whole new kind of cooking. Whole supermarket aisles are full of products that have been specially formulated to be microwave-friendly, or that wouldn't exist at all without the microwave. People's lifestyles have changed because of the microwave. If you looked around at all the gadgets in the average person's house, you'd be hard pressed to find more than a couple whose absence would be more keenly felt than the microwave...the computer, the TV, the phone. All of those were expected to be revolutionary though, so they haven't exceeded expectations as the title asks. The microwave has had a much more profound effect than expected.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
A free knockoff of a 30-yr-old OS is the "latest thing from the 'bazaar' of great ideas". I think it's really Unix that is exceeding expectations, in its Linux avatar.
I just find it depressing that, as good as the ideas embodied in Unix were 30 years ago, they haven't been dramatically surpassed, perhaps two or three times, over a time span in which hardware performance has offered four or five *orders of magnitude* increase in power.
The GUI probably counts as one, but it's not as if the CLI itself has improved dramatically (except in performance), or the GUI and CLI have joined forces to dramatically increase the power of the combination. The closest you get is running a GUI to do GUI-only things and to open several simultaneous windows in which you can do 30-yr-old CLI-only things.
I guess a technology can exceed expectations by virtue of the fact that no significant improvement has occurred in years.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
A friend of my younger brother was over there a few years ago and had to ask my dad how to use the phone because he'd never seen a phone without a number-pad on it. Pathetic. Times are changin and these young whipper-snappers aren't learning things that we took for granted. Like learning to read the time off of the face of a (non-digital) clock.
Uh huh. And can you successfully start up a crank-started car? Ride a horse (sans saddle)? Skin an animal from stone chips you've made yourself?
Remember, just because something *used* to be a certain way, doesn't mean it can't be improved. And people aren't stupid for not learning how things aren't done anymore.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
No, this is not sarcasm or irony. The software that runs the Space Shuttles, to this day, was written in the early 70s. The computers they're running on, IBM AP-101s, were designed in the 60s. There have been a few upgrades over the years but nothing major, e.g. in 1992 they went from magnetic disks to solid state storage. The guts of the system, 400,000 lines of HAL/S, remain the same. NASA has no plans to change that, either; the software just works too well. The difference being able to read gyro data at 1000 times a second with 1960s hardware, versus 10,000,000 a second with today's, is meaningless. Statistically, the software has <1 bug, and none that impact the performance. Basically, it's perfect, and it will continue to exist as long as the shuttles themselves do. (Speaking of outlasting your design, NASA recently decided that the shuttles wouldn't be replaced until 2020, meaning that they could theoretically be launching a 40-year airframe some day. That's older than any school bus you ever rode on, and your school bus wasn't being frozen, pressurized, launched at 3Gs, and torched to 2500 degrees, six times a year, either.)
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I don't fault this PhD guy for not knowing how to defrag a hard drive, but I don't necessarily think its all that impressive that he has a PhD and does NOT know how to defrag a hard drive!!!
Defragging a HD is not an obvious concept. Hell, on a decently designed system, one should never have to invoke a defragger!
But it doesn't seem to occur to everyone here, than most physics PhD's never use windows. Why use windows when you can use UNIX? The guy has probably used UNIX all his academic life, simply because that is what we use in academia. So he uses a Windows box for the first time, and hasn't heard of defragging or know how to do it. Big deal.