old top of the line technology

[TurdBerglar]

is very fascinating.


everything eventually seems come to a point technologywise. when a new industry opens up and there's more than one manufacturer making all these new similar gizmos, they all have these wild ideas and designs. then over the years each manufacturer through trial and error eventually settle on a design that can't really be improved much more. they all seem to find the same formula for their design for a particular application. there's always a best way to do something and they all eventually seem to find out that best way. then everything gets so efficiently stream lined and similar.

but in the beginning those gizmos are so insanely different from one another all trying to do the same thing. all these wild over the top ideas and designs are so manic that it's more like art than practical and efficient.

[TurdBerglar]

a great example is formula one race cars from the seventies.

there was an actual car that used a massive fan to suck it down onto the track to create more traction.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/2001_Goodwood_Festival_of_Speed_Brabham_BT46B_Fan_ car.jpg


another one fucking had 6 wheels

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tyrrell_P34_2008_Silverstone_Classic.jpg


radical differences between that cars today is pretty much none existent. they all pretty much look and do the same things.

[Waus]

I thought it was interesting that Soviets developed really really sophisticated analog computers, even ones that used water. US went digital and the Russians were building these crazy machines that arrived at the solutions in very different ways.

[TurdBerglar]

whoa, what?


have you got a link to that?

[cosmo105]

I NEED A WATER COMPUTER RIGHT FUCKING NOW

[cosmo105]

http://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto-water-computers.html

[Documad]

I remember when my uncle came to visit and talked my dad into buying the first calculator I ever saw. Texas Instruments, like the ones at the top of this page (http://mathcs.albion.edu/~mbollman/EarlyLED.html) with red numbers on the screen. I can't remember if ours had the % key or not. It cost a lot (for my dad to pay), but my dad was like me and big on new gizmos. And of course one of the first things I did was enter 7734, which looked like "hELL" in those old fashioned digital numbers.

I think things moved pretty fast after that, because our next calculator had a bunch of other functions.

[TurdBerglar]

i can't imagine a simple calculator being the pinnacle of everyday technology. you could have probably taken over the world 60 years ago with the computing power of todays smart phones.