Author Topic: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s  (Read 5059 times)

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Offline Alex Eisenhut

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #25 on: June 01, 2021, 12:47:22 am »
How about Boolean logic?

"Boole's work and that of later logicians initially appeared to have no engineering uses. Claude Shannon attended a philosophy class at the University of Michigan which introduced him to Boole's studies. Shannon recognised that Boole's work could form the basis of mechanisms and processes in the real world and that it was therefore highly relevant. In 1937 Shannon went on to write a master's thesis, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in which he showed how Boolean algebra could optimise the design of systems of electromechanical relays then used in telephone routing switches."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole
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Offline Kerlin

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #26 on: June 01, 2021, 01:03:54 am »
Yer so we can all google that on the net, as I had when Ichecked the wiki page to get the date correct.  I have covered it, so what are you adding?
Point is it is not new just an adaption.

I was there I was trained,installed and repaired relay technology telephone exchanges and finished up using ARM for Avionics applications, so am well aware of what happened.
Other useless info anyone can google - the first telephone exchange was made by an undertaker called Strowger,  it was followed by Linefinder exchanges. I worked on those too.
« Last Edit: June 01, 2021, 01:19:59 am by Kerlin »
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Offline Cerebus

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #27 on: June 01, 2021, 01:08:59 am »
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.

Try starting earlier, in the 18th century, and then carry on until the early 20th century and you're nearer the whole picture.

Leonhard Euler 1707-1783 (Not really a direct electronics connection, but you can't leave old Leonhard out.  :) )
Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827
Joseph Fourier 1768-1830
Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777-1855
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel 1784-1846
George Boole 1815-1864
Pafnuty Chebyshev 1821-1894
James Clerk Maxwell 1831-1879
Gustav Kirchhoff 1824-1887

To name a very few of the 18th and 19th century Mathematicians whose work underpins electronics. When you look at the dates you realise that a lot of the higher level mathematics we rely on are really quite old.
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Offline Kerlin

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #28 on: June 01, 2021, 01:12:55 am »
Yep right on there mister, that covers the thread topic of whats new since the 60s.
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Offline Cerebus

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #29 on: June 01, 2021, 01:16:27 am »
Yep right on there mister, that covers the thread topic of whats new since the 60s.

Who pissed in your chips?
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Offline thermistor-guy

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #30 on: June 01, 2021, 01:30:25 am »
Joke title and obviously not true..
...
What are some other examples?

A counter-example: Polymerase Chain Reaction, invented in 1983 by Kary Mullis, used to quantify DNA. He shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it; the first time it had been awarded for an experimental technique, because PCR was that important. It changed bio-technology profoundly: there is before-PCR and after-PCR.
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #31 on: June 01, 2021, 02:59:56 am »
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.

Try starting earlier, in the 18th century, and then carry on until the early 20th century and you're nearer the whole picture.

Leonhard Euler 1707-1783 (Not really a direct electronics connection, but you can't leave old Leonhard out.  :) )
Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827
Joseph Fourier 1768-1830
Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777-1855
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel 1784-1846
George Boole 1815-1864
Pafnuty Chebyshev 1821-1894
James Clerk Maxwell 1831-1879
Gustav Kirchhoff 1824-1887

To name a very few of the 18th and 19th century Mathematicians whose work underpins electronics. When you look at the dates you realise that a lot of the higher level mathematics we rely on are really quite old.

Another way of looking at this is that it takes about 100 years for math esoterica to develop real engineering application.  There are newer mathematics in use now, and probably stuff that is fresh in the math department now will find uses in the future.
 

Offline Cerebus

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #32 on: June 01, 2021, 02:26:18 pm »
Another way of looking at this is that it takes about 100 years for math esoterica to develop real engineering application.  There are newer mathematics in use now, and probably stuff that is fresh in the math department now will find uses in the future.

I'm sure that is entirely true but it's more of a perspective thing for me. Until nctnico forced me to think about it, for me it hadn't quite sunk in how old some really quite complex (no pun intended) maths is. A lot of stuff from the likes of Laplace and Gauss is hard going for modern students of it, so think how much of a mountain it was to climb to invent the stuff out of wholecloth in the first place.

On how long it takes to get from conception to application, there are some notable exceptions. Alan Turing's "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem." was true mathematical esoterica when it was published in 1936, but I think it can be argued that this led to the first modern computer (Eniac 1945) in next to no time at all. (Yes, I know I'm conveniently ignoring the parallel work of Konrad Zuse, but his work was both mired and concealed by WWII).
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Offline dietert1

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #33 on: June 01, 2021, 03:03:16 pm »
The OP wanted to discuss semiconductor packaging and wiring/bonding. That's why i mentioned FPGA = "runtime wiring" and AI systems = "self wiring". Those technologies did not exist in the 1960s.
Since about 2000 chess computers reliably beat all humans. I guess it requires coherent action of many, many human brains to build something like that. There is no genius and no mathematical solution. The same will be true for autonomous vehicles. Also you may know that digital computers played a decisive role in deriving solutions to old number theory problems. In some sense the modern digital infrastructure is post-mathematics and its time scale of development seems to be shorter.

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Offline magic

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #34 on: June 01, 2021, 10:37:00 pm »
On how long it takes to get from conception to application, there are some notable exceptions. Alan Turing's "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem." was true mathematical esoterica when it was published in 1936, but I think it can be argued that this led to the first modern computer (Eniac 1945) in next to no time at all. (Yes, I know I'm conveniently ignoring the parallel work of Konrad Zuse, but his work was both mired and concealed by WWII).
Everything can be "argued" but in truth nothing new was invented in the 20th century and the first "Turing complete" computer was of course designed long before his birth :D

Theory of computability is still mathematical esoterica today and has little to do with designing real world machines capable of solving real world problems. Turing completeness easily "emerges" from an ability to follow any arbitrary finite flowchart of operations combined with "infinite" memory and pointers. That stuff has so many obvious uses that it would be built with or without Turing.
 

Offline Cerebus

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #35 on: June 02, 2021, 11:29:53 am »
Theory of computability is still mathematical esoterica today and has little to do with designing real world machines capable of solving real world problems. Turing completeness easily "emerges" from an ability to follow any arbitrary finite flowchart of operations combined with "infinite" memory and pointers. That stuff has so many obvious uses that it would be built with or without Turing.

I've actually seen in real life someone set out to try and solve a computationally undecidable problem, but they didn't know it was computationally undecidable, so it was giving them problems to say the least. While computability does indeed seem like esoterica it's surprising how often you run into it in real life and i've seen it and the closely related field of computational complexity floor more than a few programmers.

it's easy to say that you don't need Turing to get to computers, but in the same vein you don't need Newton to get to gravity, Maxwell to get to electromagnetism, or Watt or Newcomen to get to steam engines, but history is what it is. What is obvious now often wasn't obvious to everybody else until someone pointed it out. We managed to build things that didn't fall down for many of thousands of years before Hooke and friends came up with elasticity but until they did we couldn't say with certainty that a given building design was sound. Practical things need sound, proven theoretical underpinnings.

It's all well and good to claim that Turing completeness "emerges" from having a Turing machine, but you'd have to recognise that and then prove it if you start from the machine, completely arse about face from what Turing set out to do and did. The important rôle that Turing's work probably took beyond giving theoreticians the warm fuzzies in the creation of computers is likely rather more prosaic and familiar to any of who have had a non-technical boss.

Without Turing:
Minion: "I want to build this machine I'm calling a computer. It'll cost $XYZ."
Boss: "Will it work?"
Minion: "I think so."

With Turing:
Minion: "I want to build this machine I'm calling a computer. It'll cost $XYZ."
Boss: "Will it work?"
Minion: "Yes, and I can prove it mathematically."

My parts just arrived, I'm off to solder something at last.
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Offline coppice

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #36 on: June 02, 2021, 01:00:16 pm »
Theory of computability is still mathematical esoterica today and has little to do with designing real world machines capable of solving real world problems.
The theory of computability is foundational to security, and is widely important in all sorts of heavy compute activities.
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #37 on: June 02, 2021, 04:09:25 pm »
On how long it takes to get from conception to application, there are some notable exceptions. Alan Turing's "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem." was true mathematical esoterica when it was published in 1936, but I think it can be argued that this led to the first modern computer (Eniac 1945) in next to no time at all. (Yes, I know I'm conveniently ignoring the parallel work of Konrad Zuse, but his work was both mired and concealed by WWII).
Everything can be "argued" but in truth nothing new was invented in the 20th century and the first "Turing complete" computer was of course designed long before his birth :D

Theory of computability is still mathematical esoterica today and has little to do with designing real world machines capable of solving real world problems. Turing completeness easily "emerges" from an ability to follow any arbitrary finite flowchart of operations combined with "infinite" memory and pointers. That stuff has so many obvious uses that it would be built with or without Turing.

Since "nothing new was invented in the 20th century" I would really enjoy seeing the 19th and earlier century descriptions or uses of:

LASERs
LEDs
Transistors
Fission bombs
Fission reactors

For the first two one could argue that light sources such as candles were invented far earlier and these are just improved light sources, and you could argue that transistors are just an improved embodiment of the spinning ball speed governers that came a couple of centuries ago and the last two are really just improvements on fire.  Personally I would say they were new inventions.
 

Offline magic

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #38 on: June 03, 2021, 09:14:19 am »
You may want to carefully read the very first line of the very first post ;)


Meanwhile I came across this paragraph in nonsensopedia article on von Neumann:
Quote
Independently, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who were developing the ENIAC at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote about the stored-program concept in December 1943. [8][9] In planning a new machine, EDVAC, Eckert wrote in January 1944 that they would store data and programs in a new addressable memory device, a mercury metal delay line memory. This was the first time the construction of a practical stored-program machine was proposed. At that time, he and Mauchly were not aware of Turing's work.
No source is given as usual, but if true, the famous ENIAC would be another example of a "Turing complete" system designed without Turing.

With Turing:
Minion: "I want to build this machine I'm calling a computer. It'll cost $XYZ."
Boss: "Will it work?"
Minion: "Yes, and I can prove it mathematically."

one year later:
Boss: "What do you mean, additions is O(n²)?!" :-DD
FTFY. The truth is, nobody cared about theoretical "universality". From hand-cranked calculators, through Babbage's Analytical Engine and electro-mechanical cipher-breaking machines of WW2 up to ENIAC, stuff was designed with applications in mind and people weren't stupid, they knew if the application will be possible and how long it will take to execute. And if a new more complex application arrived, the design was expanded. Apparently both Babbage and ENIAC reached the limit of "computability" without even knowing a limit exists. That's how easy it is. Even the page fault handler of x86 and C++ templates are said to be Turing-complete.

At the same time, execution time is a rather important factor that the "foundations of mathemathics" crowd didn't care about at all because building actual machines was not their point, the point was to come up with any non-handwavy definition of "effective method" and that's what they did. Turing may or may not have done some later work on complexity too, I don't know, but that's not what he is famous for and that's not what his "computing machine" paper was about.

The theory of computability is foundational to security, and is widely important in all sorts of heavy compute activities.
That's complexity, not computability.
Every problem that can be solved by brute force is computable and that's another reason why computabilty is mostly irrelevant in practice.

I will tell you who actually cares about that Turing/Church stuff outside of academia. Advanced compiler design, static analysis, solvers to abstract logical problems, tools for abstract verification of digital IC designs, that sort of stuff. And even there, it's a 50:50 mix of undecidable problems and "merely" NP-hard. But of course, as Cerebus says, you won't get far in those fields if you can't recognize the former, so it is important in this context.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2021, 09:17:55 am by magic »
 

Offline tpowell1830

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Re: New technology doesn’t exist; everything was invented in the 60’s
« Reply #39 on: June 03, 2021, 08:46:45 pm »
"... standing on the shoulders of giants..."  Isaac Newton
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