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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?"
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.
Still going strong after all these years, in some form or another.
Although all I play on it is Karateka (sp?). That damn bird...
I got it in 1983.
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!
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.
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!!!
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).
Voyager exceeded your expectations? I thought it was the worst of the lot. The characters were flat, and the plots were repetitive. Every other damn episode was about time travel, and they did it poorly.
Well, except for 7 of 9. She wasn't flat.
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.
Pfft, I have some rocks in my back yard that are several billion years old. They still work just fine as lawn ornaments.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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.