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New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s

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TimNJ:

--- Quote from: dietert1 on May 31, 2021, 08:49:35 pm ---Internet in the 1960s? Any DSO in the 1960s? How about metal film resistors, TFT displays, white LED lighting, terabyte hard disks (quantum hall effect, 1980), GPS, Lithium ion battery, gold ultracaps, GaN HEMT, vaccines within a year, mutations every month.. We are living in very interesting times!

Regards, Dieter

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Yes yes...I know. See my first line:


--- Quote from: TimNJ on May 30, 2021, 07:11:15 pm ---Joke title and obviously not true..

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I am just commenting on the amount of "new" technologies that are actually "old ideas" which have finally just become practical or mainstream. And, I'm also just amazed by the amount of fundamental knowledge and discovery that happened during that time. I'm basing that off of the number of published books and papers that I've run into with publishing dates between 1950-1970, which seem to form the basis of everything we know about electronics now. And of course, there is much that came before that too!

Rick Law:

--- Quote from: dietert1 on May 31, 2021, 08:49:35 pm ---Internet in the 1960s? Any DSO in the 1960s? How about metal film resistors, TFT displays, white LED lighting, terabyte hard disks (quantum hall effect, 1980), GPS, Lithium ion battery, gold ultracaps, GaN HEMT, vaccines within a year, mutations every month.. We are living in very interesting times!

Regards, Dieter

Concerning semiconductors: For me modern FPGAs are the most surprising development. We can nowadays implement hundreds of DSPs on one chip and run them at tremendous clock rates. Another one is the availability of video processing AI systems in a credit card size form factor (JETSON).

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Internet precursor came into existence in 1969 as Arpanet, the first network implementation of TCP/IP.  The IP in TCP/IP stands for Internet Protocol.  So Internet first existed in 1969.

Many of the development you referred to were really refinements or evolutionary developments of earlier iterations.  Terabyte disks for example, from very fat and large magnetic spots to smaller and smaller spots, then vertical, then...

"Technology" really is the implementation of knowledge.  So it is justifiable to consider new implementation as new technology.  That said, refinement hardly deserve as much credit as the credit due to the first someone who first come up with that idea.

Alex Eisenhut:

--- Quote from: Rick Law on June 01, 2021, 12:02:54 am --- Terabyte disks for example, from very fat and large magnetic spots to smaller and smaller spots, then vertical, then...

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Well, they did have terabit storage in the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360

Sure, maybe those SD cards are a little bit smaller and use a little less power, but they aren't whacko fun 1960s brilliance.

And as for kilomegacycles....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward-wave_oscillator

Fun at 600 volts, what more do you need?

coppice:

--- Quote from: nctnico on May 30, 2021, 07:15:46 pm ---Just the other day I was explaining to my youngest son that the majority of the math that drives our digital world has been invented before or soon after 1900.

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Much of the maths we rely on was figured out so long ago that it was forgotten and had to be rediscovered multiple times before it was practical to mass deploy it. E.g. the FFT in various forms was worked out by multiple people from Gauss onwards, but didn't stick until Cooley and Tukey figured it out to actually start deploying it in software in the 60s. The basics of the sampling theorem was figured out long ago by people working in statistics, although I think Shannon was the first to fully express it in complex form. Even in more modern times, someone figured out LDPC in the 60s, and it was completely forgotten until someone else figured it out in the 90s with real deployment in view, and some old engineers realised it rang a bell from their youth.

Kerlin:
The truest thing I have ever read on this subject is -

We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Meaning when we design an amplifier we haven't actually done anything, its all been done for us and comes from possibly thousands of years of previous endeavor and knowledge.
Boole invented the system of Boolean logic that current computers use in 1850 or so.
So far in my life time there is nothing new only adaptions. Marketing and sales hype it up as new and the non technical are easily lead to believe this.
One of the latest is AI nothing new there just a name and how about "Makers".
Generates lots of clicks, comes from the most hyped up, hollowed out society on earth.

There is however some thing very interesting on the horizon.
Just like when we first had fiber optic and used we used it to only make Christmas trees, we could think of nothing better to do with it.
It was a solution without a use.
This maybe happening currently. All the findings that are coming out of science from places like CERN and quantum physics and the latest cosmology and the likes are yet to be applied.
It appears we now know what gravity is its a particle. Lets be crazy and imagine having a fridge with a switch on the side, when you want to move it you switch the gravity off, move it with one hand and then switch gravity back on. 

When I was a lad (haha) there was an idea around that was called Supernature.
It was headline stuff and documentaries were made on it, saw them on what was then called "T.V."
The idea was that so far we have only used the rules of nature to develop technologies.
The further idea was that in the future when we have Supernature where we would make the rules and use them as we see fit.
Perhaps the using these latest findings such as the Higgs-Bosson, which is not from the 60s or before, would allow us to head in the direction of Supernature - now that would be NEW.




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