10 Dec
2014
10 Dec
'14
5:17 p.m.
On 2014-Dec-10, at 4:00 PM, Kyle Owen wrote:
On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 5:47 PM, Brent Hilpert
<hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
Sure, me too, but at the time they were both (simultaneously) current technologies, one on
the way out and one on the way in.
All of which kind of emphasizes Roy's point of disruptive technologies. So
what are some candidates for the most-disruptive? One would be the
electronic calculator, which utterly devastated the mechanical calculator
business in just a few years.
And as much as professors tried to keep calculators out of their
classrooms, they eventually gave in. Although I'm sure HP's HP-35 error
didn't help the student's case in 1972.
I also liken this sort of discussion to my own experience, as a kid in 1972
I would go from fixing a tube radio on Tuesday,
to experimenting with 7400
TTL and 7-segment LED displays on Wednesday.
And now some of us are doing just the same. Just picked up a 1960s TV-7D/U
tube tester to check some of my tubes while I catalog them, but other days
are spent tinkering with PDP-8/Es. Vacuum tubes are certainly coming back,
especially in the audiophile and guitar realms.
I think the biggest game changer will be when high-temperature
superconductors meet with a small Josephson junction design that can yield
quantum computers on people's desks. There likely won't be any single
accomplishment there, but rather a series of them.
Kyle