Ten Technologies That Shouldn't Have Died?

Ant wrote to us with an article that's sure to provoke some discussion. The feature highlights some of the technologies that have more or less died off and perhaps shouldn't have.

AM Stereo!!

A technology that shouldn't have died? AM STEREO!!

I surprised no one has mentioned this yet. I hope I get some responses. (Hey, Taco, how about setting the default view to "newest first"?)

(What follows is a brief synopsis. You can find all sorts of information and everything you ever wanted to know about AM stereo by going here [amstereoradio.com].)

Back in the early '80s, there were a lot of AM music stations. AM radio sounded tinny and mono, while FM was crisp, clear, and stereophonic. There was legislation in many countries requiring FM stations to water down their content to help the AM stations compete, but the AM stations couldn't count on that legislation to be around forever. And with so much music on AM, there was a desire from both listeners and broadcasters to have better sound quality.

In 1982, four competing methods for broadcasting higher-quality stereophonic sound on AM while maintaining backward compatibility with existing AM radios were proposed. But the FCC, instead of quickly deciding on one as the standard, decided to try a "free market" approach. They would allow broadcasters to use which ever stereo-encoding method they wanted, and allow electronics manufacturers to support which every method they wanted. It was felt that after a few years one method would dominate and could be approved as the standard.

However, with no encoding method approved as the official standard, very few AM stereo radios were built. What if a company spent loads of time and money building a radio for one stereo-encoding method, only to have another emerge as the standard?

So, throughout the 1980s and into the '90s, many AM stations pumped out clearer, FM-like sound, but the listeners could only hear the familiar, tinny, monaural squawking they were used to, and probably wondered what the DJs were talking about when they ID'd their station as "The new WQZX, 1530 AM stereo!"

In 1993, the FCC finally approved a standard, but by then it was too late.

I can remember listening, as a kid and a teenager, to my town's top 40 station, which was AM. I always wished I could hear them in stereo. I knew that a handful of car radios supported AM stereo, but I never knew why no home receiver did. Eventually, the FM content restrictions were relaxed, and a top 40 FM station went on the air and quickly replaced my local AM top 40 station as my station of choice.

Eventually, the top 40 AM station switched to an all-sports format, but not before having one last try at keeping their music format: During their last year, they switched to an all dance-music format. They also played a lot of very new music. I always heard the newest stuff first on the AM station. But I always wished they would move to FM so I could hear them in stereo. Why they didn't, I'll probably never know.

Recently, I started working at a radio station, so a lot of my questions about AM stereo, this "phantom technology", were answered. I recently bought an AM stereo radio from eBay. You must realize that AM stereo isn't just tinny, squawking sound in stereo -- normal AM stations have a frequency cutoff at 2.5 kHz. AM stereo stations cut off at 7.5 kHz. It's still not quite as good as FM, but it's a lot better than regular AM. I'm not sure why regular AM radios don't pick up the extended frequency range. Perhaps they filter out anything above 2.5 kHz as if it were noise.

Anyway, there's only four AM stations left in my town, and only one plays music -- oldies. Only one of the four stations (not the oldies one) still transmits in stereo, the others having given up on it due to the lack of support.

The one remaining AM stereo has a news/talk format. It's kind of cool to hear their station IDs in stereo. Every Sunday, though, they send a few DJs to a local record store to play samples of new CDs on the radio for half an hour. This is the one time I ever get to hear AM stereo music, and let me tell you, it's heavenly. If only I had known about all this when I had a top 40 AM station!

It's not quite like listening to a CD, but it's a nice taste of a wonderful technology from the past that just wasn't given a chance...

Once again, go here to learn more about AM stereo radio [amstereoradio.com].

-- Rahoule

hydrogen, airships, & "non-flammable helium"

actually hydrogen really isn't that flammable either.

contrary to popular belief, it wasn't hydrogen that caused the Hindenburg disaster. Rather it was the paint used on the shell of the airship, made from components very similar to what is used in today's rocket fuel. A static charge caused this paint to ignite, thus sending the airship to its end.

The impressive photos of the Hindenburg burning show massive amounts of flames. Hydrogen burns clear so what was burning (visibly) wasn't the gas.

As a result of that accident hydrogen has gotten a really bad rap when it's not all that dangerous and has a lot of benefits. Clean cars being one example.

So add the "commonplace, everyday use of hydrogen" to technologies that have been given up on.

There are good reasons ribbon mics are seldom used

I have two RCA 77DX ribbon mics.

Ribbon mics are very delicate, and the ribbon is succeptable to damage. One idiot blowing into the mic ("Hey! Is this on??") can tear the ribbon.

Sure, they sound warm, and sound much better "than carbon and early condenser microphones." But we don't use carbon microphones (professionally) either. Condenser mics have come a long long way since then also.

The biggest benefit in the ribbon mics was the internal tube pre-amp. There are better mics today using tube pre-amps that aren't nearly as fragile.

"They have this figure-eight pattern--they accept sound from the front and back, while rejecting sound from the sides." This is silly. Most modern-day large element recording mics have this capability. It was one of the first to have the capability, but certainly not the last.

--

hindenburg

I saw a very interesting Nova documentary about the Hindenburg which claimed that the hydrogen was not the cause of the explosion. Basically, the outer skin was painted with powdered aluminium (I think), which is what we use for rocket fuel today. Hydrogen burns blue, not orange like all the eyewitnesses say the zeplin did. Also, it remained aloft quite long into the fire, which wouldn't make sense if the hydrogen was burning.

Maybe someone has some more details, but the gist of the show was that hydrogen can be made safe for airships.

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

Nonsense.

Scott Bottles wrote a book called Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City which offers a good debunking of this sadly perpetuated urban legend. Coincidentally, it was published by the same university system to which you belong, judging from your email address.

This link [lava.net] also has a good article about this topic.

The upshot: we could genuinely discuss a conspiracy only if GM pursued its course of action and dismantled the nation's systems in spite of the fact that streetcars offered more benefits than buses. Ridership peaked in the late 1920s, and had been falling off consistently for over a decade by the time the systems were dismantled in the 1940s and 1950s. Streetcars are fixed route. Bus routes can be altered. Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way. Buses share the road with other vehicles. Streetcars do have the ability to move more people in the same amount of time with a high enough level of service, but the plain fact is that they were in decline.

The hearings to which you refer were about GM's monopolistic practices in creating the replacement bus systems. Who could blame them? They were taking advantage of the streetcars' demise--brought about by the economics of the time, I must stress--and getting in on the ground floor by supplying buses. And if I had time, I'd dig up those hearings and provide testimony from people who, DURING those hearings, debunked this conspiracy from the get-go, but were drowned out by the media's coverage of it all.

I'm not terribly surprised that your post got modded up to (Score: 4), but it does disappoint me that so many people believe this when just 10 minutes of the most casual research can unearth mountains of material that debunk this myth.

MOD Music

I'm not talking about mod as in modern... I'm talking about mod as in the file format, originally started on the trusty Amiga. Think MIDI, but with the instruments stored as digital samples within the file. And think (relatively) small file sizes. Back before we had MP3s, we had MODs (or S3M, XM, etc). Every day, new mods would be released onto Usenet. Some pop, some oldies, some just plain odd, and lots of techno. People would rip samples from popular songs and remake them. Others would get similar sounding instruments and try to recreate the original song. And everyone would eventually start making their own music for the world to hear. And you always tried to keep the files as small as you could. I remember spending a weekend modding Mortal Kombat during college, not to mention the many late nights writing my own tunes. The best part was that when you downloaded a mod to listen to, you had all the instruments and the notes to play around with, yourself.

Realistically, the MOD scene is still around, though it has been eclipsed by the plethora of MP3s, etc and the advent of more bandwidth. Now, it is mainly hobbyists and the like, whereas before, you'd get people who wanted to download their favorite song to listen to it, or check out some random DJ's remix.

In case you're curious, check out: Arts: Music: Sound Files: MOD [dmoz.org] for mod files and Computers: Multimedia: Music and Audio: Software: MOD [dmoz.org] for players and trackers on Open Directory [dmoz.org]. Oh, and if you have Winamp [winamp.com], you already have the ability to play MODs.

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

Ridership peaked in the late 1920s
Well, no shit. Cars became available to the middle class. Has nothing to do with Streetcars versus GM manufactured buses.

Ridership peaked in the late 1920s,
True, but most major cities' bus routes run exactly on the old streetcar lines. So consider this advantage theoretical.

Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way.
False. They are called *Street*cars, you know.

First of all, after the depression and the rise of autos, most of the nations private streetcar systems were in serious decline when GM moved in, with cars and tracks dating back to the 1890s. However, that forstalled the inevitable, since even after the bus conversion, almost every US mass transit system was in public recievership by the early 1970s anyway.

Second, buses were only more economical in the era of cheap 50s gas and friendly loans from General Motors. If anyone had the choice in keeping an electric system or switch to gas today, they'd stick with electric. Also, unlike those 50-year old streetcars, none of those GM busses lasted longer than 20 years before having to be replaced, by the taxpayers.

Third, GM's tactics in this business were horrible. In Minneapolis, for example, they conspired with mobsters to essentially loot the system, and left the company as a bankrupted shell after they had to rip up the lines and sell the fleet for scrap. Where once the only sigificant operational cost was labor (the system was powered by a hydroplant), they then had big loans from GM and ongoing gasoline and tire costs. These sorts of tactics from a company that a 70% marketshare at the time were disgusting. This is hardly a secret conspriciy theory either -- GM ran newspaper ads bragging about what they were doing, and knew that in an environment where 'Whats good for GM is good for America', and the faux moderinity of gasoline busses, they were politically safe.

Well, anyway, stand out on Market Street in San Francisco some time with your dollar. See if you get on the 40s streetcar or the 80s bus, and see which provides better service.
--

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

Whether or not GM killed of trolleys, they frankly don't make a lot of sense in low-density suburban area, where most Americans seem to live.

Well, that's a different conspiricy! Suffice it to say that GM was a big real estate developer and also so home appliances in those days...

(Although the federal loan subsidy policies of the day were the real motivating factor behind the suburbs. Not that I can blame people. After being cooped up in an apartment through the depression and the war, with no money and rationing, and nothing getting maintained and nothing new getting built for 30 years, a nice shiny Chevrolet and your own federally subsidized 1/2 acre probably sounded pretty good!)
--

Reel Mowers are Great

Indeed. And the new ones are at least as easy to push as a power mower. We got ours because I could do the lawn while our (then) baby was sleeping.

Re:Just let go

Reading this article I can't help but think of a grandfather sitting on his porch talking to all his grandchildren. You know, the types of stories that begin "Back in my day..." My responce to this article? "Yes grandpa... I know... 12 miles to school... uphill bothways..." These technologies all had flaws in them, hence the reason that they are seen in mainstream use. (note the use of mainstream here, search long enough and you will find anything being used) It time to just let go of the old technologies and embrace the new ones.

The point of the article is sometimes that good technologies disappear and are replaced with new ones of questionable value. Reel mowers are a good example. For a small lawn, reel mowers:

1. are quieter
2. are less expensive
3. require less maintenance
4. provide less opportunity for serious injury
5. don't need gasoline, oil or electricity
6. don't emit fumes

When I see a guy mowing his 1/8 acre with a riding mower, I can't help but laugh. Sure, he has the "technologically superior" solution, but he's also ridiculous :)

10 years ahead list

January/February 2030

Ten Passed Technologies

Not every disappearing technology deserves that fate. Sometimes the "losers" have an elegance and simplicity the "winners" lack. Here are ten examples.

MS Word

The sparse and tightfisted Word processor from the extinguished Microsoft company shaped the future of modern Speech Processors (SP) and user hyperinterface: thousand of icons and buttons in the screen, random behaviour, ill-behaviour with large document, the talking clipper. It lacks of features is considered, nowdays, more a virtue rather than a defect.

ISDN and ADSL

Copperlines, the 20th-century analog of today's quantic-optic fibers, had their own "last mile" problem. One 20th-century solution: small electron quantums pushed along expensive copper cables via porting in unhealthy high-frequencies that acted as carriers.

CDs and DVDs

Audiophiles lament the passing of digital sounds and MPEG audio, which they perceive as having a richer sound than the holographic pild. But the recorded disc was in its own day an upstart technology, elbowing out a superior medium for recording sound: the dic-shaped vinyl first manufactured by RCA in the middle of last century.

Personal Computers

In 1979, Commodore brought the Personal Computers to consumers. Two years later, the final shaped of old and bloated hardware born with the name of IBM Personal Computers, which lasted for 30 years until the quantic processor won its own position in the market.

Internet

The appeareance of this technology in the general-public market, 25 years later from its invention, was believed as the greater revolution since the Gutember invention. Nowadays, it is hard to believe that such a unreliable networks technology, still based in moving electrons along copper cables and optic fiber, and therefore anti-ecologic until its own bones, could last for 30 years with no opposition from the mithyc Greenpeace. Additionally, the primitive protocol used for reliable transmission, because networks weren't reliable at all, didn't allow for bandwidth aggregation and reservation, according to the amount of "electron packets" needed for the, already dissapeared, 2D plus sound streamed movies.

... still five more, but I don't want to put them all, just in case, to avoid a the original writer sueing to my grandchildren.

--ricardo

Re:Electric Trolly.

In San Francisco we just bought a bunch of Bredas from Italy (what part I don't know). They're great.

What the author didn't mention is that SF is expanding its light rail system with as much money as it can muster. In the last decade we've added new (or restored) track on Market Street and the Embarcadero, and we're planning a major new line down Third Street and possibly up the Geary corridor. It's one of the fastest-growing parts of the SF transportation system.

There are still plenty of idiots who think we should bulldoze $500M worth of housing and put in freeways,etc., but most of them live down in San Jose or LA, where people do those kinds of things ;-)

Re:Betamax is not Betacam.

...the format used in commercial production is Betacam, which is an entirely different format. (Both were brought to us by Sony, both use cassettes that look about the same, however, they are entirely different animals.)
They aren't that different. Betacam is just Betamax with the tape running 6 times faster, and wider head gaps (you get 20 minutes on a tape).
Betacam SP is more akin to S-VHS, based on Betacam but with seperate luminance and chrominance signals.
It used to be possible to modify a certain UK Betamax VCR to play back (but not record) Betacam.

"shouldn't have died"?

I'm sorry, but this article isn't quite clear on its own concept. Many of these technologies deserved their fate, often for fatal flaws pointed out in the article. It's more of a wishlist of technologies which proved infeasible. Sure, the wax cylinder was a better recording medium, but a full orchestra in your pants would be better still. It's like the author is complaining to god that the laws of physics should have been altered to make these ideas practical.

Gameboy!!

I always thought Nintendo's Gameboy was amazing considering it's ten years old and all Nintendo has done to it is add color.(yes GBA is coming)
But not too many ten year old console game systems can still make dump truck loads of money!!!
Is it proof that game play is more important than graphics?

Automatic watch shouldn't be on the list

I don't know why the author chose to include "automatic watch" on the list. As far as I know, such devices are in wide spread use. In fact, there are even a couple of variations. For instance, Seiko's kinetic watches, which, if I am not mistaken, recharge their battery through arm movement. I've owned a Tag Hauer watch with a counterweight that wound the watchspring every time it moved around. I'm sure there are dozens of other examples. In fact, many companies use the "automaticness" of their watch as a marketing gimmick...Look, here's a fancy watch with all the guts you've come to expect it to have, but guess what, you never have to wind it!

GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

The writer of the article seems to call the notion that GM bought out streetcar lines across the country and ran them into the ground so that their buses would have to be used a "corporate conspiracy theory". Well, it's not a theory, it's hard fact. The US Senate held several hearings on this in 1943 and would have taken action to stop GM, but they were inclined to leave GM alone as the company was doing so much for the war effort, going on at the time. So all streetcars, not just electric ones, went the way of the horse and buggy...until recent years.

And yes, BETA should have definitely been on the list.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one

Reel mowers are great!

As a new homeowner, I have become a strong advocate of reel mowers, particularly the modern ones which are quieter and MUCH easier to push. Here are some advantages, in order of importance (according to me):

• They are quiet!! You can mow whenever you like and neighbors don't have to close windows to hear themselves.
  
• They are low pollution. Just CO2 from the pusher.
  
• They are low maintenance. Sharpen once every few years and they are good to go.
  
• They are cheap (about US$100 + $0 for gas).
  
• They take up very little space (try hanging a power mower from the garage wall).
  
• You can stop and chat with the neighbor for a minute without the off/on cycle.
  
• They can get into tighter spots (good if you have an odd-shaped yard).
  

They are making a well-deserved comeback, with high appeal for environment and neighbor conscious people with yards smaller than a polo field.

Re:Bubble Memory

Now, I might be going a bit off track here, but if my memory serves me right, magnetic bubble memories are still used in hostile environments (satellites, for example) where a 'conventional' RAM wouldn't last very long.

Actually a quick search on google shows that at least in Japan there is still some development going on in this field

http://www.sta.go.jp/sonota/sonota/e9908_10.html [sta.go.jp]

Engine powered reel mowers are fun!

Typically, these are sold as "tiff" mowers - tiff grass is a lightweight, oh-so-soft grass (the best damn grass to lie down on, if you ask me), that simply can't be cut by a rotary mower (rotary mowers tear and break the grass, and are thus used for hardier grasses like bermuda - tiff is soft, and a rotary mower will literally "blendo" the grass, and produce a sludge - providing you can find tiff grass that long, of course).

They are essentially a reel mower with an engine, and a wheel at the back, connected by a drop chain/lever combo. You have to push the mower, then drop the wheel to prevent a "scuff" mark on the grass (boy, was I bawled out by my boss on my first job in high-school about that!), but man - you could litterally guide them easily once going.

Now, these suckers were anything _but_ safe - the reel keeps spinning as the engine runs (of course, the model I used was old, they may be safer today, with a clutch or something) - I am sure some fingers could be chopped off by that thing (and I know more than one snail in the yard lost its life due to the mower I was using!)...

Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!

Re:Bah, none of those are dead. ;)

Yeah, I was just thinking about this very thing, while writing some email in WordStar on my Amiga, and listening to MP3s on my portable wax cylindar player, on my morning zeppelin commute to work.

Bah, none of those are dead. ;)

They're just not mainsteam. :)

You know all those subways in New York? They're powered by electricity. Sure, the metaphor is a little different, but the idea is still there: Electric powered mass transit.

Pneumatic tubes? Bah, Home Depot and Costco use these systems to this day. I worked for a company a couple years ago that maintained these systems; cashiers use them to deliver money to the vault in the back.

Amiga? HAH. I still have a functioning Amiga 2000.

Don't many studios still use some varient of the 'ribbon microphone'? Admittedly my expertise is starting to peter out, but I do know it's common for either recording artists or movie people to use older technologies because they sound (or look) a certain way.

Reel mowers, bah. I had a friend during childhood who's parents still used one.. they made him mow the lawn with it as punishment. ;)

Only commenting on the stuff I know. ;) Good technology never dies; it seems more like the really good ideas get delegated to "fans" or people who don't fall prety to marketing and/or the feeling they need the latest and greatest.

Just because you don't see a representation of it on every street corner doesn't mean something has dissappeared.

Re:hydrogen, airships, & "non-flammable helium"

Hydrogen burns clear
EVERYTHING burns clear. Flames are superheated gasses; the air becomes so hot that it glows. Sort of like iron. When you suggest that hydrogen burns clear, you are either saying that it burns so coolly that the air 'glows' in the infrared, or it burns so hot that it 'glows' mostly in the X-Ray spectrum. Both are ridiculous propositions.

And to top it all off, I've burned hydrogen, and it DEFINITELY produces a flame...

Clean cars being one example.
Yes, hydrogen-burning cars can be safe...because the hydrogen is dissolved in metal and it can't explode, and it is bled off continuously and dispersed.

You have been reading TOO much hydrogen car propoganda. Yes, hydrogen-powered cars can be good, but it is also true that hydrogen burns.Just like gasoline. Or diesel.

Huh?

The airship shouldn't have died? The slide rule? Slide rules are great, but they don't run Pac-Man anywhere near as well as my HP48sx.

Seriously, what about some of the great ones? Betamax, or Sony's 8mm wallet-sized videotapes?

What about remote GUI login? Unix had it, and Windows never caught up (no, pc anywhere doesn't count). People still don't know that they should be able to log into their home computers wherever they are.

What about guns? Colts are collectors items not because they're old but because they're the best revolvers ever made. Today's guns suck by comparison - the tolerances are way down, machined rather than hand matched.

IBM's butterfly notebook?
actually playing music on MTV?

we should do a slashdot article and pick the 10 best abandoned technologies. these don't even come close.

Swordmaking

Neither do you, if you think that modern technology isn't used at any point in the process. Yes, the swords are made the same way, with a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Yes, they're still made with alternating layers of clay and metal. Yes, there's still a lot of ritual that goes along with the creation of a sword.

And yes, modern metallurgical techniques are used.

Who do you think reads all those graduate theses which have been written on Japanese swords? Swordmakers, for the most part. Because once you take a good, hard look at what makes a Masamune so perfect, that gives you a big hint as to how to make your own swords better.

Your comment is about as informed as someone saying "violinmakers haven't changed their techniques in hundreds of years". Considering that some scientists come tantalizingly close to producing Stradivarius-quality instruments by careful study and analysis, violinmaking is undergoing rapid change due to modern technology.

This is the way the world works. The world wants it fast, cheap and good. The merchant says "fine, pick two", but the prosperous merchant says "fine, I'll give you all three". The second kind of merchant puts the first kind out of business.

Science is a wonderful tool with which to drive down costs of quality goods. It doesn't replace the human touch, nor can it ever replace human expertise; but people who say that science has no adjunct role to play are smoking crack.

Even when it comes to swordmaking.

amazing coincidence...

I had been planning on making a zeppelin, who's command center was controlled by an Amiga, and the on-flight movies were provided by Betamax tapes... and I wrote the proposal w/ Wordstar!

This article saved my life! I am now moving back to my original idea of a canvas-winged plane controlled by punch cards, and the power is generated by hamsters running in little wheels.

I'd hate to accidentally use outdated technology for such an endeavor.

Manufacturing and tolerances...

This applies to just about everything mechanical, not just firearms, BTW.

Colts are collectors items not because they're old but because they're the best revolvers ever made.

Which Colt revolver would this be? The Single Action Army? The Patterson? The Python? The King Cobra? All of them are remarkable weapons (I've used all of them save the Patterson). All of them were machined.

... machined rather than hand matched.

Samuel Colt didn't "hand match" his weapons. He was smarter than that. The virtue of Sam Colt's weaponry was that the parts were all interchangeable, and that's only possible with machining and mass production, not handcrafted individual objects d'art.

Today's guns suck by comparison--the tolerances are way down

My SIG-Sauer is manufactured to tolerances which are usually reserved for jet aircraft. My Kimber M1911A1, likewise.

You also seem confused about tolerances in general. Saying that "tolerances are way down" is a good thing. That's like saying "tolerances fifty years ago were 0.1mm, tolerances this year are 0.01mm." If tolerances are down, that means manufacturing techniques have improved.

Now, manufacturing tolerance isn't the same as operational tolerance. Operational tolerance ought to be very high--weapons are expected to tolerate many different kinds of ammunition without a hiccup, in the most awful conditions. A modern 9mm Glock will chamber any 9mm ammunition you want to throw at it--AET, JHP, LRN, hardball, Glaser, whatever. A 9mm Browning, built in 1935, suffers feed failures on anything other than hardball unless you've had a gunsmith do a throat and ramp-polish on it.

Modern firearms: manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.

This, by the by, is reflected in every other manufacturing field. You remember the early '80s, when people had massive air conditioners running in their computer rooms? Now, in 2000, it can be 90 degrees in the house and I don't have any qualms about firing up my dual Pentium IIIs. Manufacturing tolerances down (from point-whatever micron down to .18 or so), operational tolerances up.

Compare an F-22 against an F-14. Your average F-14 spends more than half of its operational lifetime on the ground being serviced. The average F-22 doesn't. Manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.

A $10 toaster from 50 years ago is big, clunky, heavy and totally reliable. A $10 toaster today is lightweight and totally reliable (at least, mine has never failed me). Manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.

Good grief. Show me one, just one instance in which devices manufactured with modern techniques aren't as good as devices manufactured with traditional techniques. Even Japanese swordsmithing has gone modern. Four hundred years ago, smiths had to resort to crude and inexact methods to measure certain vital characteristics of metal. Today, smiths use modern metallurgical know-how and thermocouple thermometers to determine exactly what the optimal temperature for forging and tempering is.

Good grief.

Chicago's Ill-fated street cars

Chicago used to have a thriving street car network. It died about the same time all of the other street car systems in other big cities died.

Recently there was an attempt to revive the system, at least in the more touristy downtown areas. The system was deemed impractical, as it would have been ruinously expensive to implement, would have accentuated an already bad traffic situation, would have generated minimal revenue compared to the already existing bus system, and was not projected to draw all that many more tourists to the area ("Gee maw, let's us drive to Chicago and see them thar new fangled street cars" - not gunna happen)

-josh

Re:hydrogen, airships, & "non-flammable helium"

I think we have a misunderstanding here.

As I recall, Hydrogen burns with a very pale blue flame. Against the sky it'd be almost invisible - but it'd also rise so fast that it would burn only briefly if at all. The consensus on the programme I saw was that it couldn't have burnt in any quantity.

Eyewitness reports clearly stated the flame was yellowy-red, pointing to the doping performed on the canvas envelope. Which, as the previous poster stated, was pretty much rocket fuel and wasn't properly mounted to the chassis - so, flies through an electrical storm, builds up a charge which arcs across the body as some parts dissipate their charge through the docking rope and others don't. Result? Fire.

Philadelphia and Electric Trolleys

Of all the technologies listed in the article, the one that probably caused the greatest damage to our society is the loss of the electric trolley. They were once so popular in my hometown of Philadelphia, PA, that special funeral trolleys were run, by request, to take the bereaved to and from the church and the final resting place.

With the demise of the electric trolley came the use of the automobile and migration to the suburbs. When an individual is able to drive through a neighborhood without thought of the outside environment, he or she becomes removed from the situation.

It is this apathy that caused our cities to decline. If one was forced to walk or ride at a slow rate through what is your neighborhood, you take more care to notice your surroundings. People would still be involved in their neighbor's lives, thus building communities.

What we have today, however, is people living in isolated pods in suburbia, with no regard for each other. When homes are spaced 100 feet apart, and the only way to the local store is by driving, when would you ever have time to interact with your fellow man?

Although this really is spilt milk, so to speak, many of these problems came from the rapid conversion from electric trolleys to individual automobiles.

Pneumatic Tubes & Fresnel Lenses

In the interest of efficiency, I suggest the immediate implementation of pneumatic tubes to transport floppy & ZIP disks containing data from computer to computer. Use of proven pneumatic technology is superior to untested 'copper wire' and 'fiber optic' technology for the transfer of data.

Additionally, money being spent on creating larger monitors should be redirected to productive tasks such as maintaining the nationwide Pneumatic Tube Network. Those seeking larger screens for their comp-uters should simply use Fresnel lenses.

- Central Services
Listen, kid, we're all in it together.

They didn't really die

A lot of these ideas didn't seem to have really died, so much as to have never taken off. Many remain stuck in the same niche market of their inception. One that is a strong counterexample to to this is the slide rule. It certainly achieved great popularity in its time, but is now almost unrecognizable to most people nowadays. However, in introductory physics lab, at Brandeis, constructing one and performing calculations with it was part of our final exam. It was a very valuable experience. I don't think students in school ever really learn about logarithms like they did back before HP started popping out calculators.

Re:Wordstar deserved it.

I remember writing papers in College for Calculus and econ using a Kaypro, a dot-matrix printer, and WordStar.

I had to create a few characters that weren't built-in (like a triangle for a delta, integrals, etc). You'd have to map out your character on a 8x8 piece of paper and then calculate the binary values for each row (or was it by column?), convert to decimal (hex?), and define the character with some obscure dot command in WordStar. You could then use Control-q and some other characters to print your own characters.

Not quite WYSIWYG, but a lot of fun.

Sometimes designs are shoddy.

Modern != better. Modern usually means better, but it's not an absolute.

One of the errors which people (particularly engineers) make when designing modern hardware is they think that the rest of the world is as controlled and as precise as the product itself is. If you can specify that "the turbofan in this jet engine is made of a single crystal of pure nickel and built to 0.001mm of accuracy", it's easy to think that it's only going to be used in situations that are equally controlled and controllable.

So the net effect is the engine works great, but the first time a goose gets sucked up the intake, the entire engine is going to shred. (Don't laugh; this happens with surprising frequency nowadays.)

The problem is that operational tolerance comes at a cost in performance. A Soviet-era tank is reliable as the day is long, but it's got crappy performance. When people discover "Wow! With these new manufacturing tolerances, we can make things even better than before," they rarely consider that pushing things to the limits of performance has repercussions on operational tolerances.

Look at UNIX as an example. Quake III under Linux will never have the performance of Quake III under Windows 98. The reason is that, while Linux is a technically superior platform, Linux has large operational tolerances. It's very resistant to crashes because of the way it's designed. However, this fault-tolerant design comes at a price: by separating the 3D libraries from X, by separating X from the kernel, etc., you introduce lots of hidden latencies.

Win98, in the interest of pure gaming performance, lets the machine get down close to the bare metal. But we all know what kind of operational tolerances Win98 has--the first time you get any kind of weirdness, the entire system crashes.

Does all this make sense?

What a Box of Chocolates!

I surely didn't expect those, but I've got to agree with at least half of them!

Trollies
I more disagree than agree here... High voltage wires, even when suspended, become a hazard with falling branches etc., and have to reach far into the suburbs for most implimentations. (Nearby Dayton, Ohio still uses 'em!)

Amiga
Right On Target there... Even as a small niche, the Amiga was the prototyper's dream. A decade ahead of the competition, you could plug in a $100US-or-less add-on to digitize video, do Max Headroom-esque video effects, process live wacked out audio effects in real time...
If it weren't for the proprietary hardware, it would have Ruled The Earth. It's most saving grace was the openness of its programming.

Slide Rules? Sure, good for visualization of functional relationships. Reel Mowers? No thanks, I've use a few. AutoWatch? An engineer's moral imperative! Airships? Works for Bladerunner!

...but then again, here in Cincinnati we're still using LED watches. "If the world were going to end, I'd go to Cincinnati... everything there happens 10 years later!" - Samuel Clemens

A better list

Let me suggest a few items:

• #5 Crossbar The last of the electromechanical central office telephone switches, #5 Crossbar [navyrelics.com] has an unmatched track record: No #5 switch was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster or a major fire. That level of reliability has not been matched in the electronic switching era. The distributed architecture of #5 crossbar made the switch as a whole much more reliable than its components and subsystems. When electronic switching came in, a much more centralized approach (two redundant mainframes driving a dumb switch fabric) was used, and it failed more.
• Centralized Train Control A technology from the late 1920s that made possible the safe operation of heavily travelled railroads with multiple tracks and complicated junctions. Everything was carefully engineered to follow the Golden Rule of Signalling - everything must fail to a safe condition. Even if signal lines are struck by lightning. Even if poles are knocked down. Even if ice freezes a switch or train stop device. Details here [beanpaste.com], including a simulator down to the relay contact level.
• Stainless steel The wonder material of the 1930s. It doesn't rust. It's very strong. It looks good. It lasts centuries, maybe millenia. It's expensive and hard to work, but if you want something permanent, it's the way to go. The DeLorean was made of stainless steel. Yet today, stainless steel is a niche product. Too permanent?
• Synchronous AC electric clocks. Plug it in and forget it. No batteries to change, lasts for decades, and the power company keeps it in sync. Yet hard to find today.

Re:Sometimes designs are shoddy.

Quake III under Linux will never have the performance of Quake III under Windows 98.

Without page-flipping on both platforms, the performance of Quake III on Linux already exceeds Quake III on Windows 98 for several cards.

Page-flipping is being added soon. Given that without page-flipping the Mach64 is (just for an example) 10% faster on Linux than Windows, with page-flipping it will totally obliterate Windows.

The public benchmarks for the tdfx driver are showing Linux exceeding Windows in every single viewperf benchmark. On some benchmarks the ratio of Linux to Windows is better than 2:1.

I think you misunderestimate the potential of good design. The DRI allows data to be streamed faster than the hardware can cope. Windows 98 is surviving by myth (the myth that Direct3D is in some way faster than OpenGL) and myth alone.

Clarification

can in some cases exceed CD quality.

I thought I'd reply to myself to provide an analogy to this, as it might be counter-intuitive enough to attract flames. An uncompressed BMP (eg like CD sound) image might take, say 100kb. A compressed JPG of the same image can, (depending on the image) be simultaniously a fifth the file size (ie like MD) and at a higher resolution, such that details not clear in the uncompressed BMP image can be made out in the JPG image. Ie, the compressed data can have a better picture despite the imperfections of lossy compression. For some images (types of music), the compression artifacts will cause more damage to the image than what is gained in resolution. For some however, the artifacts can have minimal effect and the resolution gain can have great effect, and the result is unquestionably superior.

In short, my counter example to the "MP3 is like cassette" idea wasn't intended to say "MD has better sound quality than CD" (cause in all but extreme cases this just isn't the case), but rather to blur this over-simplified view that compressed=bad and uncompressed=good in an area where filesize limits are being applied (such as music reproduction).

Re:Philadelphia and Electric Trolleys

well in all honesty, the availability of automobile transportation only became possible due to massive amounts of your tax dollars used to build roads. Chances are you were never given a choice as to whether that was what you wanted.

Good point, and I agree. Public roads should be funded with tolls or other user fees. People who use choose mass transit shouldn't be forced to subsidize drivers, and vice versa. What I was responding to was the attitude that the automobile is solely an implement of destruction, people's living and travel preferences are irrelevant, and we must all be forced to conform to a utopian vision of "community".