just an asterisk

Truth be told, I was probably more excited to read this article than most… I love to read old technology reviews, detailed descriptions of gadgets that are no longer a mystery, circuits that nearly every self-respecting geek can explain down to the wire.  An ego booster for sure, these articles make me smile, as I chuckle about how little they know back then.  Moreover, I know I’m not alone – millions of geeks probably got the same kicks.

However, from time to time, these reminiscences spark a different fire, forcing me to think (with great respect) on how much has changed in so little time.*  Here is the article that got me thinking.   There are few quaint moments “The case and computer together weigh 22 pounds” and “Your type can be in bold, italic, underline or even shadow print“ but the part that really got me was this line:

… it uses a hand-held “mouse” — a small pointing device which enables the user to select programs, and move data from one part of the screen to another…

Isn’t that incredible?!?  A “mouse” in 1984 was a tremendous novelty.

This is grand, but it got me thinking – I wonder if everyone appreciates how quickly times have changed.  It’s not like the mouse was discovered in 1983 on December 31st and then released the next year by Apple.  Things may happen that way these days, but take a guess at when the mouse was invented… 1980?  1975?  How about 1963!  In fact, if you count the trackball mouse, the first prototype was used by the navy in 1952 (according to wikipedia)

The point of all this is that it’s good and great to examine past articles and say how much the world has changed since then, but it’s perhaps more interesting to examine how fast the world changes now vs then.  In 1968,  Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the first mouse to a group of rather stunned researchers.  Do you think that was all he presented? Nope.   He included videoconferencing, hyperlinks, digital text editing, and network collaboration. Let’s review those last ones again – Video Conferencing (Skype not released until August 2003), hyperlinks (the world wide web with hyperlinks was not released until December 1990), digital text editing (with a graphical user interface, WordPerfect didn’t take over the market until the mid 80s) and network collaboration (network meeting software did not take a hold until the mid 90s). You can read more about this event here.

Take a look at the date one more time – 1968 – Now it’s true that these technologies evolved and part of their evolution was making them affordable for mass production and useful given the average internet connection or PC. However, I can’t get over how long this took.  Does it always take this long for a product to come to market?

I know I’m not really making much of a point here.  I seem impressed with the speed of technologies motion today, but I’m offering no proof that technology moves faster today than it did 20 years ago.  The truth is that I have very little data and I’m genuinely curious about the answer.

The one piece of knowledge that I have is Moore’s law: “the number of transistors inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit has doubled every two years”  This law has been used to describe the incredible and in fact exponential growth of the technology industry over the past 50 years.  However, I still feel like there’s more to it.  That might explain why capacity increases but it doesn’t capture the whole story…  The speed of innovation has to be based on some other value, something which probably involves both economics and human nature, not just improving abilities to perform a task.

I’ll keep thinking about it, but I figured I’d share my thoughts so far…

~ab

*  An enormous pet peeve of mine is when a writer uses the word reminiscence and feels compelled to include a reference to Proust’s Madeleine cookies…  If the purpose of a blog is to allow the author to vent, those pompous people (who probably use air quotes too) should consider themselves rebuked…  We’ll have none of that here on Just an Asterisk… **

** I realize that writing this tirade is rather hypocritical.  However, that is also a privilege of having your own blog.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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