A question asked on a business forum recently set me thinking. The question was – Your thoughts on the best invention of the last ten years?
Try as I might I can’t come up with any single thing that fits the bill. Many other people suggested Broadband, Mobile telephone developments and improvements in the personal computer, some even suggested that search engines were of the highest order of importance.
The problem is that none of these were invented in the last ten years. Probably the biggest single step has been the availability of Broadband access, but while the services to provide this are new, the technology certainly isn’t. DSL (as in ADSL) has been around since nineteen forty-eight.
Up until around ten years ago it was just too expensive to deploy on a large scale basis. At that point in time a major step was made in the advancement of Very-large-scale integration (VLSI). This is another technology that has been around for a considerable period of time, but the late nineties saw a major step forward in capability.
That enabled the telecommunications and networking organisations of the world to start work on Broadband delivery.
There are two morals here.
The first is that the next time you start marvelling at the latest new technological service to be rolled out, pause and reflect that you are probably looking at the result of two or three decades of research and development. Ground work that may well have been taking place in several different branches of science and engineering.
The second moral is that DSL took three decades from conception to world wide delivery. How many decades did it take to go from Da Vinci’s drawings of flying machines to a modern airliner?
The gestation phase grows less.
Shared knowledge.
Try as I might I can’t come up with any single thing that fits the bill. Many other people suggested Broadband, Mobile telephone developments and improvements in the personal computer, some even suggested that search engines were of the highest order of importance.
The problem is that none of these were invented in the last ten years. Probably the biggest single step has been the availability of Broadband access, but while the services to provide this are new, the technology certainly isn’t. DSL (as in ADSL) has been around since nineteen forty-eight.
Up until around ten years ago it was just too expensive to deploy on a large scale basis. At that point in time a major step was made in the advancement of Very-large-scale integration (VLSI). This is another technology that has been around for a considerable period of time, but the late nineties saw a major step forward in capability.
That enabled the telecommunications and networking organisations of the world to start work on Broadband delivery.
There are two morals here.
The first is that the next time you start marvelling at the latest new technological service to be rolled out, pause and reflect that you are probably looking at the result of two or three decades of research and development. Ground work that may well have been taking place in several different branches of science and engineering.
The second moral is that DSL took three decades from conception to world wide delivery. How many decades did it take to go from Da Vinci’s drawings of flying machines to a modern airliner?
The gestation phase grows less.
Shared knowledge.
Comments