Technologies that Have Exceeded Their Expectations? 1037
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?"
Voyager (Score:3, Insightful)
Beating a Dead Horse? (Score:5, Insightful)
TV/Telephones (Score:4, Insightful)
Unix (Score:5, Insightful)
FAA System (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
I know one.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 Internal Combustion Engine (Score:5, Insightful)
-S
My cell phone. (Score:3, Insightful)
Tech Life (Score:3, Insightful)
Paper Products (Score:2, Insightful)
And for planning things out and high-level organizational diagramming, I have yet to find a system that works better than a pad of Post-It notes and a roll of paper. We were promised papreless offices and homes years ago, and people were fortelling the end of Dead Tree books since the emergence of eBooks - but look around. I still see lots of paper on my desk.
We may have been told years ago that it was obsolete, but it's still the number one tool for many jobs.
Re:As a tech support person... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
HTML (Score:5, Insightful)
My old windows install floppy. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The plain old wood pencil and ball point pen (Score:3, Insightful)
Other methods have more fidelity, but none have the simple human factors.
Guess I have to add paper to this list as well...
TCP/IP (Score:3, Insightful)
Ballpoint pens (Score:4, Insightful)
How about the B-52? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ethernet (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Anything older than 20 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
Somewhat analagous to the space program, eh? Pioneer, Voyager, etc.. much more longevity than anything that gets sent up these days.
Unix and C ofcourse.. (Score:5, Insightful)
amiga--- (Score:2, Insightful)
(8 mb ram at 30 mhz...). Now it,s ancient technology..
Amazing =8-)
Re:Beating a Dead Horse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy one.. Paper! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Commodore and Amiga Computers (Score:2, Insightful)
The best selling computer ever, the Commodore64 will live forever.
It taught more people to how to write programs than any other too. It rewarded learning hexadecimal. It rewarded the user learning how to program hardware registers, which now seems a lost art, alas...
Then was born the Amiga series. Amiga sported a futuristic OS with hardware to match. Amiga did all that is kewl in home computing first.
These Commodore sold computers did it all: Better, faster, cheaper, AND for much much _longer_ than its competition -- even now.
64's and Amigas run all night and day and have rocked the world for decades now. Thats a long lllloooonnnnnggggg time, and I get off on it!
These classics are backed a next generation: AmigaOS4, The AmigaOne, The C-One Omnilator: these should prove just as durable.
I say "You can never kill everything of Commodore."
*(And hopefully Bernies mighty Umithlon too!)
Microwave (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Magnetic Media (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:TV/Telephones (Score:4, Insightful)
Sad, I think (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Paper Products (Score:3, Insightful)
I work at an engineering consultant office doing HV/P/E work. We got a laser-plotter a few years ago... want to check the drawings? Plot out a set. Only takes about 5 seconds per sheet (30" by 42"). After marking it up with highlighters and colored pens, there's a good chance the whole set will be plotted again with the changes we made.
Usually between 10 and 20 sheets for a job, sometimes as many as 80 sheets.
Before the laser plotter, we had an inkjet plotter. It would take nearly 10 minutes to plot out a single sheet on that thing! Corrections were done by printing out portions of the drawings on letter paper. You better believe we're going through a lot more paper now!
Especially when there's an obvious mistake. "Oh crap. Guess I'll have to reprint it..." *click click* *another 12 square feet of paper wasted*
=Smidge=
Re:SR-71 Blackbird (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How about COBOL? x86? (Score:3, Insightful)
Initially, yes. However, it lasted this long because Intel worked very hard to keep it alive. If the x86 trailed, for example, the PowerPC-based Macintosh by 50% in performance, many things may be very different.
Had that not happened, x86 would be at best a footnote, along with the 65XX, Z80, etc.
The 6502 and Z-80 are not "footnotes". They deserve prominent spots in CPU history marking the beginning of personal computing and affordable gaming consoles. When the x86's time finally comes, it will also be a major milestone marking the maturing of personal computing.
Apple Newton (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a very strong and active user community [newtontalk.net], plenty of help [thisoldnewt.net], and gobs of software [unna.org]. An incredibile amount of work has been poured into the device with addons like wireless networking, CompactFlash ATA support, Shoutcast and MP3 playing, web serving, and desktop synching. All this adds to the Newton's built in PIM, notetaking, and email support.
I use my Newton for a telnet client, guitar tuner, notepad/to-do lister, and MP3 player.
The first usable [oldschool.net] Newton was put out in 1996 and the most powerful [everymac.com] and expandable Newton was released middle of 97. The thing's lived a long life and looks like its gonna keep on chugging for a long time more, expecially since they can be found for just over $100 on eBay and the continued support of the Newton community. I know I won't ever ditch it.
Re:As a tech support person... (Score:2, Insightful)
IMarv
Re:Anything older than 20 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
The ultimate technology. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, Kraft Mac & Cheese....
Re:Sad, I think (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology isn't supposed to change. It's supposed to *optimize.*
I would suggest that since it hasn't changed significantly for decades is an indication that its users, at least, consider it something near optimum.
It is the *fact* that it hasn't changed much, and your objections to this, that combined serve to prove it has exceeded expectations.
Further proof that it has exceeded expectaions can be found in the fact that your premise is essentially flawed. The developers of UNIX have since gone multiple generations beyond in development, i.e. it *has* changed over time, but the users see no particular reason to make any switch.
About the absolute worst you can say about the 30 year old technology of Unix is that "it suffices."
KFG
Old stuff, durability, costs, & the space prog (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [nasa.gov]
cassini cost [astronautix.com]
voyager cost [nasa.gov]
pathfinder cost [nasa.gov]
The Fender bass guitar & tube amps (Score:2, Insightful)
Leo Fender probably didn't 100% invent the bass guitar, but probably is close enough in so many essential details. The first Fender "Precision" bass guitars were meant to make road gigs easier, and were also designed to be played by a guitarist doubling as a "bass" player. The earlier models (before mid 60's) had a "finger rest" so that the fingerpicking guitarist could play a bass line with his thumb - the finger rest eventually migrated to a new position and became the "thumb rest".
Fender also didn't really invent guitar amps, but the various Fender models are still a standard. Basically they just took standard designs out of the RCA applications books, put them in a really heavy duty box, and rock music as we know it today evolved around those amplifiers.
Re:What else as gone beyond the norm? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:old phones (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Of Course, the Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
Who woulda thunkit.
Shuttle software (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Internal Combustion Engine (Score:2, Insightful)
"Clean Diesel" isn't very clean. While very fuel efficient compared to a spark ignition engine, the so-called celan diesel engines have severe NOX emissions problems. This is important, because it is NOX (or actually the resulting ground level ozone), NOT CO2 that has an effect on human health.
Hybirds, which you mention, on the other hand are an important development. They allow an ICE (gas or diesel or turbine for that matter) They allow the engine to run much closer to its peak efficiency (by averaging the load using the battery), which saves fuel and reduces emissions.
One of the big differences between American and European air quality policy is that American regulators in the U.S. have chosen to trade fuel efficency for improved public health, while europeans would rather have people suffer from lung disease to fend off the spectre of global warming
Re:Not everyone can do every job (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Hammond Organ Tone generator (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why don't we send a relay probe? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, I guess voyager isnt collecting all that much usefull info as its information gathering devices werent built to "read" the info in deep space
(excuse the spelling errors, Im a bit drunk)
Zippers (Score:2, Insightful)
The best purchase I ever made (Score:2, Insightful)
I bought them my first year in college about twenty years ago when I was doing a lot of skiing. I replaced the wool liners about five years ago.
They have remained perfectly waterproof, and my feet have never, not once, ever been cold while wearing them.
Not very high tech but worthy of mention in this thread.
-ccm
Re:Not Just HP! (Score:2, Insightful)
Also have one of the first LCD watches, a Micronta from 1975. Gains about 2 seconds a day (always did, they couldn't seem to fix it) but otherwise runs fine.
The B-52 (Score:2, Insightful)