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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 Voyager Probe
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
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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My washer and dryer are almost 30 years old....
I have a Casio calculator (FX501p) still running happily after more than 22 years!
My Magic Eightball is great for answering questions from our sales department. Saves a lot of time on some of those questions that rely on actual thinking.
Both the tv and telephone are excellent examples of technology that seems to defy the ages. Esp. the good ole telephone. In this high tech age, it hasen't changed much (well at least from the end user perspective).
Still going strong after all these years, in some form or another.
I'd have to put Palm OS devices in this category. I have had a Handspring Visor Deluxe for nearly 3 years now. It's black and white. The are no fancy graphics or sounds. However it keeps a mean phone list, address book and calendar. As a Physician, I like the third party software that is a handy quick reference for pharmaceutical dosing information. I have absolutely no reason to upgrade to anything better.
Although all I play on it is Karateka (sp?). That damn bird...
I got it in 1983.
..my liver.
Trolling is a art,
The FAA had a top flight (my pun) system 30 years ago. It's still running and they want to spend billions to upgrade it. The programmers have all retired (or jumped off of buildings in the dot.com bust).
Tisha Hayes
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 Real Doll. That thing goes WAY beyond expectations!
Oh, wait, I dont think thats what you mean, was it...
hmm...
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
The x86 Processor. Created in 1982 with the unveiling of the all mighty 286 (both 8, 10 and 12Mhz speed demons).
:-)
Granted the main core has gone through some overhauls (Major ones include 486DX2, Pentium, P6 Core, K6, Athlon).
Seriously though, who would have thought it would hang in there for this long ?!
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?
I made it out of a Charmin toilet roll and some tinfoil found on the street back in 1977. To this day I use it.
The SR-71 Blackbird aircraft was in many ways 20-30 years ahead of time when it was first created and put into service. An amazing piece of engineering and materials technology.
Is it too much to expect a technology to last a few decades, rather than it being a shock?
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
for what seems like decades now we've been hearing wild, utopian speculation regarding an endless stream of leg-covering technologies, each hailed as a 'pants-killer'. on seemingly a yearly basis, it seems, sony or microsoft or archer daniels midland trots out some promising technology to replace pants -- some intended to render not just the item but the entire pants PARADIGM obselete forever. but for all this new-fangledness, what's that on your ass, i ask you? huh!?!?
man, am i hung over.
god is just pretend.
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.
Hey just you wait until it comes back to destroy earth as VGER.
Users are like bacteria, each one creating a tiny problem until the host dies.
Oh and another thing - when I first started college, I bought a single Sony double-density 3.5 floppy disk. That's 12 years ago and it still works. Yes, yes, I know, floppies are obsolete... but really, I bought a box of 3.5s (figuring they'd be a lifetime supply) and I'm lucky if I get a dozen rewrites out of them. That original floppy has been overwritten literally thousands of times. What gives with that?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I love my old Amiga 2000. It still does some things better than a damned PC. *sigh*
I'd say it exceeded its expectations. The floppy disk was originally invented by IBM as a way to insert code updates into mainframes (think flash rom but bigger). Computer scientists/engineers found it could make a handy portable storage media and the 3.5" disk that we use today is just an evolved, smaller version.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
The people who developed TCP/IP would have never thought it would be used as widely as it is now. ISO OSI stack was supposed to be the standard network protocol. But It failed miserably.
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).
This is a firearm originally designed in the 1900's that is still one of the most popular designs of all time. The 1911 is considered by many to be as accurate, reliable, and rugged as any of the most modern firearms available. I inherited one that had originally been made for the U.S. Army in 1918 and belonged to my great-grandfather; it still functions perfectly to this day.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
My parents still have a rotary [pulse, dial...] phone in their kitchen. It still works just fine (after about 25 years of use from a family of 7) so there hasn't been a need to replace it. Although impatient people complain that you still have to wait a full 5 seconds longer to complete your outbound phone calls compared to touch-tone phones. (oh the horror!)
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.
Anyways... back to the subject.
TV, telephones, wallclocks, pocket calculators (solar powered ones too), etc... there are a bunch of pieces of technology I use every day that have lasted beyond initial expectation.
I wish I could say the same thing about computers now-a-days. (Most are considered "old" or "out of date" within 6 months.)
Karma: NaN
Unless your old laptop burst into flames, if you have owned an Apple product, you understand that Macs are a hell of alot cheaper in the long run than any computer out there.
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.
Look at any aircraft, and the main movement is governent by these four:
Throttle.
Ailerons (via "wing warping).
Elevator.
Rudder.
That basic configuration hasn't changed since Orville and Wilber used it in 1903.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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."
... the spark plug.
Spark plugs have not changed at all in at least 60 years, as far as the OEM styles go. They have been remarkably similar since their original designs, a graphite core surrounded by a ceramic insulator surrounded by a metallic threaded ring. Amazing.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
You have several good points (4, or 6?) in there.
:)
Someone, mod this up to 3 (or 5?).
The Commodore 64 (or 66?) was definately a cool piece of hardware, but at age 12 (if I am accurately recalling my age; 14?) I had to suffer with a Tandy Color Computer 2 (or 3?).
You might want to sit down for this.
I once knew a Ph.D. who called saying that his "CD-ROM" drive wasn't working right and that it messed up his CD. No problem, I'll be over shortly to check it out. Then, I got to thinking, "He doesn't have a CD-ROM drive!!!"
Sure enough, the guy tried to put a CD in a 5 1/4" Floppy Drive. The drive actually tried to read the CD! It messed up his CD and the drive! I couldn't decide if I should smack him or just laugh until I couldn't breathe.
OH, BUT IT GETS BETTER!
His Ph.D. was in Computer Science!!! I kid you not!!!
The man was just too smart to get out of the RAIN and had the common sense of a rock.
The truth is usually just an excuse for lack of imagination.
Launched October 18, 1989 by the Space Shuttle Atlantis. It had some technical problems in 1991 (high gain antenna wouldn't deploy) but they were able to use the low gain antenna to send data back at a vastly slower rate).
It became the first spacecraft to take a close up photo of an asteriod and when it reacher Jupiter in 1995, the first space craft to drop a probe into a gas giant. It's mission was to last only until 1997, but it was given a two year extension. The mission continued another three years AFTER the extension, sending its last scientific data back in November 2002 as it passed the moon Amalthea. In August of this year it will burn up in Jupiters atmosphere.
The spacecraft has operated over twice as long as expected and has taken three times the radiation it was designed for, and still it mostly works. The plunge into Jupiter is because the craft is running low on fuel and they would rather burn it up than risk having it possibly slam into Europa, contaminating it before we can check for native ba cterial life there.
While it's certainly not lasted as long as Pioneer, it has taken one hell of a beating from the intense radiation of Jupiter, the tidal stresses of orbiting the gas giant and its planet sized moons as well as flying through toxic (and possibly caustic) volcanic plumes kicked off of the surface of Io by eruptions.
So I would say that Gallileo is in fact in the same class as Pioneer when it comes to be being built tough.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
That, my friend, is because the only things that are still around from 30 years ago are the ones that were durable. In another 30 years, people will say the same thing about today's things, because the crap will already be broken and disposed of. Sure, there will be millions of Huffy bicycles in the trash. But people will have forgotten them, and will marvel at the amazing durability of the high-end Treks and whatnot that survive.
And the space program differences are all about cost. The Pathfinder mission (which landed on mars) was part of the Discovery series of missions, capped at $150 million. Cassini, the last of the Voyager/Pioneer-type "heavy engineering" designs cost $3.4 BILLION. Pioneer 10 cost $350 million, in 1970. Voyager 1 and 2 cost $875 million together, in 1977. (those obviously need some inflation adjustment to be fair to a 1996 mission, but even Pioneer is more than double the cost without adjustment!) Of course there's going to be a performance difference when you pay many times as much. Even so, Galileo (another old-school nasa design) cost $1.6 billion, and its main antenna never opened. Would you rather have 10 cheap missions where 8 fail, or one expensive mission that fails?
Sure, we've lost lots of recent mars missions. But all added together, they barely cost as much as some of those single probes.
Links:
pioneer cost
cassini cost
voyager cost
pathfinder cost
The server running our family domain is an old SE/30. It runs totaly headless because the onboard video went out, the ram is maxed way past what you are supposed to be able to put in it, it runs MK linux, and at last count was hosting 15 domains. The surpizing thing is just how fast it is! I never notice any lag when I connect and I'm about 1500 miles away!
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
The humble paperclip.
From a history of the paperclip on about.com:
"Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor with a degree in electronics, science and mathematics, invented the paperclip in 1899. He received a patent for his design from Germany in 1899, since Norway had no patent laws at that time. Johan Vaaler was an employee at a local invention office when he invented the paperclip. He received an American patent in 1901 -- patent abstract "It consists of forming same of a spring material, such as a piece of wire, that is bent to a rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop, the end parts of which wire piece form members or tongues lying side by side in contrary directions." Johan Vaaler was the first person to patent a paperclip design, although other unpatented designs might have existed first."
Over 100 years old and still going strong...
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
No doubt, the SR-71 is/was purty, but nothing ever has beat the record of the good old Gooney Bird.
So durable that eventually the FAA gave up and declared it exempt from end-of-life regulations.
So durable that some have been flown under combat conditions with a third of the wing blown off.
The only thirty year old cargo plane ever to be reconfigured as a combat gun platform (the Dragon, a.k.a. Spooky, a.k.a. Puff the Magic Dragon)
Rebuilt as a turboprop and outperformed new aircraft.
Left abandoned in a field of snow up past the Arctic Circle for an entire winter and then, dug out from under the snow, started up, and flown home.
No longer manufactured after 1946, still in use to this day.
The one, the only, The DC-3!
Yay!
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
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.
Bought it in 1981. And, what's more (*much* more), it's still in its second set of batteries. Amazing low power consumption.
So with that in mind, I nominate the Great Wall of China, still standing after all these years. I think it qualifies whereas things like the Pyramids don't, in that they never served any real function. I bet the wall would still work pretty well today, if there was a war. Not perfect, but good.
If the goal was to pick classes of technologies, I think most of the responses here are exceptionally shortsighted. I think sail technology, the steam engine and the wheel had a lot more staying power, and who knew?
I think there are some good specific examples. Any real old bridges out there? Panama Canal is great, 'course it was designed to last a long time. I bet there are some irrigation ditches somewhere that were dug thousands of years ago, and still work. Stepped hillsides fall into that category, too. Most people who built them probably paid no heed to them lasting longer.
Pioneer is unique, because there was really no way to maintain it, and it was a 1 (or 2) shot deal. Those HP calcs are fine, but have more than 10% lasted this long? I'd love t hear about some scarecrow that's been scaring away crows for 200 years without a person laying his hands on it. What's the longest any manufactured item has lasted (and remained useful) for without human intervention? Kudos to the winner.