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?"

Voyager

[Elvisisdead]

The Voyager Probe

Beating a Dead Horse?

[superdan2k]

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.

TV/Telephones

[binaryDigit]

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).

Unix

[leerpm]

Still going strong after all these years, in some form or another.

FAA System

[Tisha_AH]

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).

Linux

[Rob.Mathers]

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.

I know one..

[WndrBr3d]

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 Internal Combustion Engine

[sdo1]

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

My cell phone.

[dasmegabyte]

I only paid $10 for it. I'm surprised it works at all.

Tech Life

[Fascist Christ]

Is it too much to expect a technology to last a few decades, rather than it being a shock?

Paper Products

[BSDevil]

As self-evident as it seems, note paper has stayed around way longer than I expected it to. It's a simple, cheap setup with the ultimate handwriting recognition system. If I want to write someting significant I'll open my word processor, but for quick little notes and calculations nothing will beat my pad of McGill notepaper.

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...

[unicron]

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.

HTML

[seldolivaw]

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.

My old windows install floppy.

[Xzzy]

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. ;)

The plain old wood pencil and ball point pen

[PotatoHead]

With all the ways to capture information we have today, these two still are quite effective.

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

[clevelandguru]

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.

Ballpoint pens

[Sowbug]

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.

How about the B-52?

[elcheesmo]

Over 50 years after it was introduced, it's still in use...with a few slight changes of course.

Ethernet

[bstadil]

Ethernet must be at the top if the list.

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?

[Astin]

Am I the only one who notices that appliances and other electronic/mechanical devices from 15+ years ago seem to be MUCH better built than today's models? Sure, today's stuff is lighter, but that plastic seams to break much too easily. Give me a 30 year old blender that can crush ice in seconds over a new one that has a hard time with bananas anyday.

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..

[dracken]

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).

amiga---

[nahual]

I still use mi Amiga 1200 and earn money with it!!!
(8 mb ram at 30 mhz...). Now it,s ancient technology..

Amazing =8-)

Re:Beating a Dead Horse?

[DunbarTheInept]

The system has always been as bad as it was in the last election. Ballots lost on the way to the counting center, polling stations running out of ballots, ballots getting jammed in the counting machines, people not understanding what they were doing. It's always been crap. The margin of error was always one or two percent. It's not that people got stupider, it's that this was the first time the margin was close enough that this always-existant problem became relevant.

Easy one.. Paper!

[k98sven]

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.

Commodore and Amiga Computers

[joetee]

IMNSHO
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

[Salamander]

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

[v1]

I grew up on 5.25" floppies. Never could figure out why they decided to carry the name "floppy" over to the 3.5" 'hard discs', as they were anything but floppy. And then to add to the confusion, they came up with fixed disk drives, and called them "hard disks". Were they TRYING to confuse us? But look at it... we've been in a "magnetic media" age for what, over 30 years now. (anyone remember "drum" or "core" memory?) We were suppsed to be using crystals or holograms or isolinear chips or those spiffy colored rectangles in STTOS by now. I think the tech is getting about played out, it's time for something new.

Re:TV/Telephones

[NineNine]

I agree, except for cordless telephones. For some reason, my cell phone works virtually anywhere in the world, for days on a charge, and is usually crystal clear. For the same price, my cordless phone works only up to about 20 feet away from the base, can keep a charge for no more than 1 hour off of the base, and sounds like shit. Cordless phone technology is perhaps the worst technology of our time.

Sad, I think

[GCP]

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.

Re:Paper Products

[Smidge204]

If anything, technology has increased the rate we use paper.

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

[Jupiter9]

Very true. But the U2 (which I believe came before the Blackbird) has been proven to be a more economical and versatile spy plane. I'm not even sure if there are any Blackbirds out of mothball anymore, but there's several (upgraded) U2's.

Re:How about COBOL? x86?

[GlassHeart]

No, it lasted and dominated because IBM happened to choose it to be the cpu for their PC.

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

[Presence]

The Apple Newton [ucla.edu] is, in my opinion, a great example of technology living beyond its expected lifetime and abilities:

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...

[IMarvinTPA]

My girlfriend is the front desk manager at a hotel. From what she has told me, I feel that people take NO initiative when it comes to doing anything. If you find someone who is willing to take initiative, they're probably worth a few magnitudes of their weight in gold.

IMarv

Re:Anything older than 20 years?

[cybercuzco]

Thqats a common misperception. If you had an appliance from 15 years ago that WASNT reliable, you certainly wouldnt still have it around, it would have been replaced 14 years ago. After an initial burn in period, when most appliances fail, appliances will last for quite a long time. In My grandparents old house they have a fridge that was bought in the mid 50's that has never been broken a day in its life. In fact it outlived my grandparents. Of course, if you make appliances too reliable, no one will ever buy another, which is what happened in this case, as the company that made those refrigerators, Philco, went out of the buisness of making fridges years ago.

The ultimate technology.

[Angelwrath]

The drying of a cheese-based mixture that, when combined with boiled, complex carbohdrates makes something relied upon by Men and students all over the world.

Ah, Kraft Mac & Cheese....

Re:Sad, I think

[kfg]

One might point out that the steering wheel is a technology that hasn't moved much in 100 years.

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

[raygundan]

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 [nasa.gov]

cassini cost [astronautix.com]

voyager cost [nasa.gov]

pathfinder cost [nasa.gov]

The Fender bass guitar & tube amps

[Scodiddly]

OK, it's not especially geeky, although I could cite a recent Simpsons reference if necessary.

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?

[XSforMe]

Je je... Seriously though, you might be amazed at how reliable your liver can be. I heard on the radio this morning that it is the only human organ that can actually regenerate itself entirely.

Re:old phones

[freeweed]

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.

Of Course, the Internet

[serutan]

Starting as a mere communications and education system, it has evolved into a multibillion dollar entertainment, marketing and anti-privacy engine, becoming a huge single point-of-failure that could collapse the world's economy within days.

Who woulda thunkit.

Shuttle software

[drix]

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.)

Re:The Internal Combustion Engine

[rrkap]

"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

[tconnors]

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.

Hammond Organ Tone generator

[uncleduck]

I own 3 Hammond Organs, and nothing digital sounds as good. The latest Roland vk-7 organs come close, but no cigar. The combination of electromechanical tone generation and tube amplification is unbeatble. Unfortunately they weigh a few hundred pounds each. I just played on an organ dated from 1947, and it was the warmest sounding instrument I have ever touched. Sweet.

Re:Why don't we send a relay probe?

[haedesch]

My laymen's guess is that it would go at least as fast as voyager, and would therefore be even costlier to launch, as it wouldn't be able to use the beneficial effect of being accelerated by the planets it passes as it would have to go in the same direction as voyager is now, and its too soon for the planets to be in the same positions.
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

[mev]

Invented [ideafinder.com] more than 100 years ago and still going strong.

The best purchase I ever made

[ccmay]

For me, the one single purchase that exceeded all my expectations was a pair of Sorel Caribou cold-weather boots.

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!

[Telecommando]

TI SR-10 bought in `73 or `74. Still works like new.

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

[Brown Line]

The SR-71 certainly is a design that's stood the test of time. But it's a relative newcomer compared with the granddaddy of all combat aircraft, the B-52. It first flew in the 1950s, and is still going strong.