Life of technology

Image from: Wikipedia Commons

It seems granted that computers should work with electricity and quietly (ignoring the fan). There was a time, however, “computers” were like your car engines, full of camshafts.

The most famous mechanical computer was perhaps the “differentialmachine” designed by Charles Babbage in 1800s. He is now considered as “father of the computers”. It was very legendary and had been used by the British government to produce astronomical and mathematical tables. The best mechanical computers were perhaps the ones used to calculate bomb trajectory in the World Wall II, after which computers became electrical.

It is hard but interesting to imagine what the world would be like if we are still using mechanical computers. Personal computing may still be possible, but each time you want to calculate something, you may need to hook it up with your car engine as the source for mechanical power. The Silicon Valley won’t be in California, but near some coalmines. Actually it won’t be call Silicon Valley, but maybe steel valley. Internet can also be conceived, however, in the form of railways.

Although an information era supported by mechanism does not sound realistic, it is still very pitiful to see the mechanical computer passing away, however hard Charles Babbage had worked to initiate its birth. Not only mechanical computers, vacuum cubes, for instance, which was the foundation for the first generation of electrical computers, can hardly be seen nowadays either. Even an electrical engineer may not know what a vacuum cube is!

I remember a lecture on magnetic devices about five years ago. The professor expressed pathetically what he had seen in the recent magnetic technology history. The computers has once relied on small magnets (though huge from the viewpoint of nanotechnology) and magnetic strips for both information storage and processing. Yet now, magnets are only used in hard disks, while all other components are electric, including the internal memory. In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of products similar to CD and DVD were developed in Japan. Instead of relying of optical properties, these products used a layer of magnetic material to store information and were read magnetically. However, these magnetic disks had never hit a wider market; they were only sold in Japan. Their existence was hardly know to people outside Japan. Now, they seems to have totally disappeared, losing the whole market to CD, DVD, and Blue-Ray. The magnetic technology had pioneered in many application, but then lost the competition to later players.

This is like the wild nature. Animals struggle to survive. If the evolution speed fails to keep up with the changing environment, the whole species may distinct. Closely related to the technologies are the companies. We no longer have SUN, the once software giant. Also, can anyone recall Palm? It was the first producer of personal digital assistant (PDA) in the world. Recently, Blackberry is at the same situation where Palm had been around 2009.

Image from: dualdflipflop

Perhaps, the most ironic tragedy is about Kodak. Kodak invented digital photography in 1975, but was killed by this technology thirty years later. The company had once secured almost 90% market share of photographic film in the US. People in Kodak were reluctant to develop digital technology for fear that it would hurt the photographic film business. This inevitably happened, but Kodak lost the leading position. It gradually shifted the market away from the highly profitable photographic film, ending Kodak’s life. The technology of photographic film may also be history as well.

If a technology can be thought of as a life, it is a life worth our respect. Although some of them have faded away, there have been an era that belongs to them. There can be a line of technological history, with symbols representing human talent and effort, like the Pyramids and the Great Wall.