What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

#41

Post by SilasX » Sat, May 14, 2016, 4:46 PM UTC

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #8

Animats wrote: post #2

1870-1920. Electric light, automobiles, aircraft, radio, paved roads. Railroads everywhere in the developed world. Electric mass transit (trolleys, subways) in major cities. Tractors and combine harvesters on farms. Refrigeration. X-rays. In computing, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company (later IBM) produced the first printing tabulator, the beginning of commercial data processing. Those 50 years held the grea…

I'm constantly amazed how many not well-known things were invented back then that sound like something that came only recently, for example sending photos over the wire - some time ago I saw a video [1] about wirephoto [2] that blew my mind a little, I would never guess that the first photograph sent over the wire was in as early as 1921! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LetlcmqZFyA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

Any reason homes with phones back then couldn't have "emails", in the sense of being able to receive text messages from other phone numbers and automatically print them to a paper feed?

Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

#42

Post by Retric » Sat, May 14, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

ahoka wrote: post #18

digi_owl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems to me most of that can be traced back to the electric generator/motor. Without it, the rest of them becomes impractical or impossible.

I think we could always find a thing that made the next big innovations possible. Newton said that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. I also wondered the other day if humanity could rebuild the current level of technology given a select team of our brightest and all available knowledge, but no tools or machines. We would have to recreate so much in lock step to event get to the most basic things. Just think…

Raw materials are the real limitation. Three thousand+ years ago people where transporting tin thousands of miles because few tin mines existed.

So, if your starting with the correct raw materials and enough food you could probably get to early CPU's in 10 years or so.

Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

#43

Post by digi_owl » Sat, May 14, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #41

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm constantly amazed how many not well-known things were invented back then that sound like something that came only recently, for example sending photos over the wire - some time ago I saw a video [1] about wirephoto [2] that blew my mind a little, I would never guess that the first photograph sent over the wire was in as early as 1921! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LetlcmqZFyA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

Any reason homes with phones back then couldn't have "emails", in the sense of being able to receive text messages from other phone numbers and automatically print them to a paper feed?

Well you had things like ticker tape.

but there was not really any concept of store and forward like you have with texts and email.

Notice how they had to tell the operator to make sure there was a clean line, then manually sync the two devices.

I guess you could claim the telegraph network had something akin to store and forward, as each operator would note the message, and then relay it down the chain.

Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

#44

Post by aab0 » Sat, May 14, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #42

ahoka wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we could always find a thing that made the next big innovations possible. Newton said that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. I also wondered the other day if humanity could rebuild the current level of technology given a select team of our brightest and all available knowledge, but no tools or machines. We would have to recreate so much in lock step to event get to the most basic things. Just think…

Raw materials are the real limitation. Three thousand+ years ago people where transporting tin thousands of miles because few tin mines existed. So, if your starting with the correct raw materials and enough food you could probably get to early CPU's in 10 years or so.

> Raw materials are the real limitation. Three thousand+ years ago people where transporting tin thousands of miles because few tin mines existed.

I think that example demonstrates the opposite. Getting raw materials is not a problem; it's so easy that people thousands of years ago were shipping raw materials thousands of miles when there was a need for it.

It's knowing the need and having the need which is the hard part... Tons of silicon can be found on your local beach and have been forever. But we only got computers a century ago.

Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

#45

Post by _nedR » Sat, May 14, 2016, 6:24 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #17

Hopefully getting the Internet in the hands of many non-technical people with Smartphones and tablets will get us to another Era of Innovation. Many people started using the Internet that wouldn't have it it was only available on PCs. The "born after the iPhone" children will get old enough next decade to do their own thing and new ideas will spread :)

The way i see it, artificial intelligence, automation, an the internet will drive a lot of changes in the coming 50 years

Right now almost every existing industry is being reborn online. Amazon did it with retail. Uber is currently doing it with tranaportation. This interconnectivity is leading to increasing centralization in the quest of efficiency. Trillion dollar corporations might not be far off.

The internet coupled with AI and automation. will further transform entire industries. Low hanging fruit include banking, finance, accounting and legal indsutries. Will a bank branch exist in your city 50 years from now? Add robotics to the mix and then we are looking at serious improvements in quality of life. Machines could perform tasks requiring high dexterity and may match or exceed humans in this regard. When self-driving comes, it will transform how cities look and our relationship with transportation. Millions of lives could be saved. This wave of automation will put millions out of work - IIRC the trucking industry is the largest employer in the US. Since the invention of the loom people have predicted that machines would put the population out of work. So far, people have found ways to stay employable in the service of machines (making, operating and repairing them). But we may have peaked in that regard. People will find it increasingly hard to make themselves useful in this new economy. How will society respond? Will we adopt a basic income ? Will we achieve an Athens without the slaves? What will capitalism look like in 50 years?

Other stuff i cant even begin to imagine. How will medicine look like in the next 50 years? Our quality of life as measured by life expectancy may improve, but what about the quality of those final years? Will we still just live long enough to be killed by cancer? What will combat look like? War? The current drone wars seem to hint at the direction we are going. In the future, advanced nations might fight entire wars in far away lands without a single citzen being physically deployed. Will global deaths from conflict increase or decrease as a result? How will the enemy respond? What will our energy infrastructure look like in 50 years? Will we have free energy? Or at least close to 100% renewable? Or will battery technology or some other issue still stand in our way?

Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

#46

Post by SilasX » Sat, May 14, 2016, 6:28 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #43

SilasX wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason homes with phones back then couldn't have "emails", in the sense of being able to receive text messages from other phone numbers and automatically print them to a paper feed?

Well you had things like ticker tape. but there was not really any concept of store and forward like you have with texts and email. Notice how they had to tell the operator to make sure there was a clean line, then manually sync the two devices. I guess you could claim the telegraph network had something akin to store and forward, as each operator would note the message, and then relay it down the chain.

Well, what I mean is, with phone calls you already had (as soon as someone picked up) a data feed. If you could automate that pickup, and relay it to the ticker, you have a kind of email, albeit without the storage. Why couldn't they do something like that?

(Edit: in fairness, that would be more like "land line texting" than email.)

Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

#47

Post by Retric » Sat, May 14, 2016, 7:26 PM UTC

aab0 wrote: post #44

Retric wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raw materials are the real limitation. Three thousand+ years ago people where transporting tin thousands of miles because few tin mines existed. So, if your starting with the correct raw materials and enough food you could probably get to early CPU's in 10 years or so.

> Raw materials are the real limitation. Three thousand+ years ago people where transporting tin thousands of miles because few tin mines existed. I think that example demonstrates the opposite. Getting raw materials is not a problem; it's so easy that people thousands of years ago were shipping raw materials thousands of miles when there was a need for it. It's knowing the need and having the need which is the hard…

People are not dumb, if there was a closer tin mine they would have used it because transportation costs jacked the price though the roof. It's a problem of geography not know how.

Sure, now we can extract gold from sea water and it's just a question of cost. But, in a collapsed world your much more limited.

Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

#48

Post by digi_owl » Sat, May 14, 2016, 7:36 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #46

digi_owl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you had things like ticker tape. but there was not really any concept of store and forward like you have with texts and email. Notice how they had to tell the operator to make sure there was a clean line, then manually sync the two devices. I guess you could claim the telegraph network had something akin to store and forward, as each operator would note the message, and then relay it down the chain.

Well, what I mean is, with phone calls you already had (as soon as someone picked up) a data feed. If you could automate that pickup, and relay it to the ticker, you have a kind of email, albeit without the storage. Why couldn't they do something like that? (Edit: in fairness, that would be more like "land line texting" than email.)

And while looking into the ticker tape i completely missed the obvious, the teletype. You know, that device that gave us the the /dev/tty in unix.

That said, it seems most of them were operated over dedicated networks. And the one i can find a reference to that was operated by AT&T had their own area codes etc.

All in all i get the impression that it could be done, but likely only so at great expense. Consider that having a ticker tape printer in your home suggested you were someone with great wealth that was watching the stock market 24/7.

Even having a telephone was not chump change. My parents talk about having one phone for several households, with the bell patterns used to indicate who it was for.

I suspect we should not underestimate how much the IC and packet switching has driven down cost of installation and operation.

Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

#49

Post by chipsy » Sat, May 14, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #46

digi_owl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you had things like ticker tape. but there was not really any concept of store and forward like you have with texts and email. Notice how they had to tell the operator to make sure there was a clean line, then manually sync the two devices. I guess you could claim the telegraph network had something akin to store and forward, as each operator would note the message, and then relay it down the chain.

Well, what I mean is, with phone calls you already had (as soon as someone picked up) a data feed. If you could automate that pickup, and relay it to the ticker, you have a kind of email, albeit without the storage. Why couldn't they do something like that? (Edit: in fairness, that would be more like "land line texting" than email.)

Faxing did exist essentially as soon as they came up with wirephoto. It was just really, really expensive for a long time, and you got a better average benefit out of a long distance call or telegram.

Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?

#50

Post by Animats » Sat, May 14, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #43

SilasX wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason homes with phones back then couldn't have "emails", in the sense of being able to receive text messages from other phone numbers and automatically print them to a paper feed?

Well you had things like ticker tape. but there was not really any concept of store and forward like you have with texts and email. Notice how they had to tell the operator to make sure there was a clean line, then manually sync the two devices. I guess you could claim the telegraph network had something akin to store and forward, as each operator would note the message, and then relay it down the chain.

Edison's first profitable invention, in 1869, was a way to get stock tickers to sync up automatically. It was a hack (send lots of idles every once in a while to force the printing wheel to hit a stop) but it was good enough to deploy. Previous printing telegraph technology, back to 1852, required a skilled operator at the receiving end to manually sync. That was used only for main lines with heavy traffic.

Howard Krum finally figured out how to do sync right in 1919, when he invented serial stop-start async as we know it today. In 1924, he came out with the Teletype Model 14 tape printer, with the first reliable mechanical async decoder. That design was used into the 1960s, and most computer serial ports are compatible with it. (45.45 baud, 5 bits, no parity, 1.5 stop bits.)

Telegraphy was store and forward, but manual at first. By the late 1920s, punched tape was used, but someone had to manually look at tape, tear off each message, and put it in the proper outgoing reader. This was manual Sendmail. After WWII, automated forwarding centers were built, with paper tape punches connected to readers via a bin as the storage mechanism and telephone-like switches to change connections. These were hugely expensive to operate for the amount of data transferred, but it was essentially email, with electromechanical technology.

(I restore Teletypes as a hobby. Here's a Model 14 working.[1]. If you want to see some in action, they'll be at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention, Memorial Day weekend, in San Jose.)

[1] https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14