What modern technology amazes you?
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With all this new technology, I am often in awe at some of the achievements that were made without the benefit of all the technology that we have now. The moon landings were the greatest example of this.
I watched "The Imitation Game" again yesterday (about Alan Turing) and the fact that he effectively built a mechanical computer from scratch, to decipher the Enigma codes, was truly amazing.
I still have on my desk a mechanical calculator, from my early days at work. It's a great piece of engineering. Here's one.
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Interesting device Ian, I noted that it cost £37 10 shillings new in 1957. that's the equivalent of £846.40 today. The one at £47 10 is now £1017.10.
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This was similar to my first calculator here It was a Rockwell but had green digits display. I bought it from Rediffusion tv shop which was the only shop in Derby to stock them in about 1976.
For younger readers Rediffusion hired out televisons, yes you hired them.
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The OS Road map. Forget your SatNav and your "smart" phone. Give me a good OS map so that I can see the big picture.
Apart from that, I think the cordless drill is one of the best bits of technology.
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I grew up during the home computer revolution in the late 70's and 80's.
I was a geek and intuitively knew how to use them and learnt how they worked. I was truly excited about technology and what it could achieve.
I was there in the early days of the internet when it was just a bunch of universities and research labs, well before the "web" was born, that too filled me with excitement and joy of what would come.
I'm afraid that recently I've become disenchanted with technology on the whole, it's useful but not as exciting for me as it once was.
Yes, I have a supercomputer phone that wouldn't have fit in a warehouse 30 years ago. Yes, I can broadcast to the world from the middle of a field. Yet something has gone from modern machines, maybe the soul.
Modern technology doesn't amaze me, it's just the accumulation of the "smaller and faster" incremental changes that've been going on since the electronics age began.
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Whilst I would champion almost all Technical achievements, for me, it is Face time or similar. When my terminally ill mother went into hospital and then on to a Hospice, she was able to make contact with all her family and friends - some in America. This allowed those, too far away to go to see her, to chat and share their thoughts with her (almost in person). And by the way mum was 101. Without video conferencing she would not have enjoyed her last weeks as much as she did.
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There have been 2 articles in my paper this week concering flying cars.
A Dutch compant have apparently built a hybrid road and flying car, sale price about £500,000 and Flying Driverless taxis are to be introduced in Dubai as early as next year.
Gives me the heebeejeebees. Imagine an equivalent of the M25 but 100 feet above your head? Wonder if the Wherenext of the late 19 th. Century had similar thoughts about the car?
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The Flying Dutchman, eh? Still, better than it being piloted by Harrison Ford.
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Hopefully the personal ownership of cars will reduce once we have autonomous driving electric vehicles and we won't need flying cars that'll fall on you or your house when they crash.
All the billions of cars that sit idly in car parks for 90% of their life is just a complete waste of resources. Carpooling would be so much easier if all the cars talked to a central place and made the best use of the route to pick up and drop off the maximum amount of people.
I can see that there'll be a need for caravanners to move caravans around, but there's no reason an autonomous car couldn't do that too.
'Autonomous trucks would also help with the issue of the truck drivers needing to take rest breaks, or falling asleep at the wheel.
There'll be a lot of people losing their jobs to automation in the next few years. Technology has always been used to displace jobs and I can see that the next Luddite movement might be against the autonomous car.
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There'll be a lot of people losing their jobs to automation in the next few years. Technology has always been used to displace jobs and I can see that the next Luddite movement might be against the autonomous car.
Looking at some of the idiots on the road these days it can't be any worse.
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Aircraft. . . . . How the . . . . . ????
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