Shovelhead

Recieved this from a coworker this morning.
Very thought provoking.

http://www.glumbert.com/media/shift

crobtex

If you look back to the invention of the Intergrated Circuit back in the early '60's, that is about when the acceleration of technology began. During my 35 years with Texas Instruments I saw a lot of changes. The same changes are taking place today, but at a much faster pace.

MikeyB

I have been in the computer industry for 25 years now and the last 10 years has been an explosive growth in technology advances. With these advances we are also seeing issues unheard of 10 years ago too. Pushing the technology in semiconductor fab design, PCB design, and system density.
Notebook technology is really pushing it with its small form factor, RF immunity with onboard WWAN, WLAN, Bluetooth, etc. and still try to have a decent battery life. And trying to keep it all from overheating....

MikeyB

crobtex

Amazing how things change.....but don't change. We were fighting the same problems in the mid '60's.

The real challenge, back then, was when we tried to do sub-micron spacing on IC's. It seems the physics of everything changed.....the whole industry ending up having to design new processing equipment and pattern printing technologies.

Chrisreyn

My dad worked for Univac, as a civilian worker for NASA during the Apollo moon shots. I can remember him bring home boxes of punch cards, and 3X3 pieces of pegboard that had foil on one side. He wold read the cards and me and my brothers would "program" the "circuit boards" by plugging large cables with RCA jacks into the boards.
That was how they did the flight computations for the moon landing!
I remember NASA's " supercomputer" built in Slidell, La. in '67 or 68....destroyed by Hurricane Camille in 69? I think... It was about twice the size of a school gym, and did math equations, nothing else... used vacuum tubes and magnetic tapes......todays pocket calculators do more than that computer did..
amazing how fast it has all changed

crobtex

If I remember correctly, some of the early Univac's occupied multiple story of office buildings. Due to all the vacuum tubes, heat was a severe problem.

At one time, we were selling dime sized silicon wafers to Univac. No idea what they done with them, but I guess it wasn't enough.

I have vivid memories of the punch cards and the HUGE IBM computers that sounded like a combine when they cranked up to read the cards. These were also used in telephone office with cards the were at least a foot long. In one COBOL class I took, we would write the programs and the key-punch class would convert them to cards.

Wow, I hadn't thought of this stuff in years! Back then, it was just an interesting job, but now I can see the significance of it all.

patdaly

When I went to Purdue in 79/80 we programmed the IBM 360 with punch cards. Man, a simple program would take forever and a stack of cards that would choke a horse. You also learned very quickly to guard your cards, because there was always a joker who would switch a couple of cards in the middle on you........good luck finding which ones.

Fast forward to 1982 and another University, amazing technology, there was a actual teletype terminal that printed to PAPER! What was even better was there was a 150 baud connection to other universities ( DARPANET, IIRC). Man, did I ever spend a bunch of money on paper........

Amazing where we are at!

dssimecek

The progress is astounding. My dad was born the same year as the Wright brothers first flight. He lived to see man land on the moon.
When I started with a company called Teleregister in 1962 they has the stock qutations boards, airline and railroad reservation systems.
The stock quote high speed telegraph line, TG1, was 100 WPM. It used rotation brushes on a faceplate to read the line, and decode with a relay matrix. Stock market volume was about four million shares a day.
Airline systems were the same. I remember at PanAM center in New York they had a big board with the flights on it. When a flight was full a cloths pin was used to hold the switch closed.
300 baud modems were a marvel. First new computer stuff was cards with transistors, and componts soldered on. The backplanes were hand wired.
Took a class on IBM comuters with the peg boards and punch cards. Laced a deck once.
Octal code was a break throgh, Toggled switches to load the programs. A long, slow error prone process.
When I retired two years ago, I was working with satellite communications. Mega bits per second.
Met my second wife on line, I was in Seattle and she was in Houston.
Lot of progress and changes.
Buckle your seat belts it is going to be a fast ride.

BigBlue

Geez. Yall act like a portable DVD player is a big deal. I've been playing with those since like middle school.

GhettoVaquero

my mom is a school teacher and asked me to present to her 3rd graders for career day. i work in the computer industry and showed them a picture of UNIVAC. They asked me how they used the internet on it. I'm 29 and its the first time I had one of those moments. Yup kids, there was a time when their was NO INTERNET! You would think they watched me shoot their dogs.

DieselDaze

I live it daily.
Id like to think that I am part of that exponential curve.
Problem with that thought: The curve often looks like the letter "L" leaving me looking more like a bug on a windshield after entering said curve.


Heres another video that parallels the same idea:

VIDEO


Rich

Fronty Owner

I look at it like this. When I was in 3rd grade, my mom had to take a college class to be able to keep up with MY homework. Now, Im and engineer and actually work primarily in R&D. even I have problems keeping up with technology.