I’m not talking about some extraordinary robot I read about in Time, I’m talking about simple iPhone apps.
Todays terribly amusing and fascinating gewgaw (employing an archaic word for the most modern of things) is my little grocery list. I finally tested the “scan barcode” option, which I was sure would be much too glitchy and troublesome to bother with, if it worked at all.
Well shut my mouth!
I held the phone up to the item, and as soon as the barcode was just kind of in frame, the app automatically switched from the instruction “center barcode here” to “wait for scan” - I waited a couple of seconds, there was a “ding!”, it quickly searched and bam! There it was: Quality Care Bathroom Cleaner, 16 oz.
I was and am ridiculously amused and delighted by this, and then I think: why? What about this surprises you, really? It’s 2011, you’ve been hanging around computers in a very major way since 1985, and in fact were beside yourself with glee the first time you encountered a checkout stand that was able to make use of the funny barcodes that had been appearing on everything for a long time, and that was 34 years ago! (Although NOT amused by the horrible computer voice announcing every purchase in detail…those went away quickfastandinahurry.) You were beside youself with glee over scanning itself when it was a horribly slow and extremely glitchy procedure that involved attaching an adapter to a dot-matrix printer and waiting while it carefully scanned line by line.
You were thoroughly delighted by all the capabilities of the iPhone and iPad…so why would the combination of these things be so remarkable and fascinating?
Dunno. But it shore is.
Other apps that have really blown my mind includes the one that learns your sleep patterns so it makes the alarm go off at the optimal time for you to awaken refreshed (alhough I haven’t even tried it because I sleep like a crazy person and I don’t think it would even make it through the night, much less calibrate properly), and this, which defines amazing and amazingly useful.
I remember the days of police scanners and ham radios. Now, there’s an app (Scanner Radio) that gives me instant access to police, fire, private, and other radio feeds. WORLDWIDE. I can hear, live and in the moment, what’s happening in Tokyo, Auckland, New York, etc…
You should be amazed. You are living in a technological revolution. People have never been exposed to so much technological change, so quickly, as right now. Be amazed.
Apparently I’m easily impressed. I go to Old Sturbridge Village fairly regularly and no matter how often I see them spinning wool, it never ceases to amaze me that someone came up with a way to shave a sheep and make clothing out of it. My mom went with us on Monday and she couldn’t get over the fact that patterns can be put into fabric using a loom (I’m also intensely interested in this). Unfortunately, I never seem to be there when someone is using the loom.
I have a hard enough time comprehending how fabric is made. I don’t even try to understand technology.
When I was a kid we used 8 track tapes which provided 4 selectable channels and 90 minutes of music. Those were supplanted in quality and quantity by multi-disk cd changers about half the size of a shoe box which provided up to a day of continuous music. Those have been replaced by a chip the size of my little fingernail which can hold over a month of continuous music. the medium can’t get any smaller and still be handled.
During this time I went from typewriter to computer and the futuristic storage disk in Star Trek has come and gone.
It never occurred to me as a child that I could hold a device in my hand that would contain all the roads in North America and direct me to any address on those roads via satellite triangulation.
It also never occurred to me that I would be able to tap into an encyclopedia with no last page or that I could carry that information with me.
What has not surprised me is the ability to digitize information but it has made research and photographic preservation exponentially easier, cheaper, and better. I use to have to carry around a portable copy stand with film and expensive light bulbs and it took forever to get a decent archival copy of a photograph. Now it’s all done with a laptop and a slim flatbed scanner. It cost’s me almost nothing to acquire and store information versus endless hours of work and money. Just to copy (5) 8 X 10 pictures would have cost $20 on the cheap to do it manually.
How about some of the things that you were involved in that are available now and how long they took to develop? Or clues to neat stuff that doesn’t violate the products in development now?
Every few months or so, I still get a twinge of amazement that I can speak to someone by phone from my car. From my CAR! I mean, how cool is that?
Then again, I’m old and remember when you leased your home phone from AT&T and a technician had to come to your house and install it. There were no wall jacks with modular plugs; the phone cable had to be wired into the wall.
I personally don’t work in R&D. I’m just privy to the information because I work there.
As far as past developements? Eh, maybe I’m just a paranoid freak but I’m not comfortable giving that information out because it would be real easy for people to figure out where I work.
And fancy colors like harvest gold or olive green cost extra.
The thing that really blows my socks off is LED lighting. You can have a flashlight that literally will light a room, last for hours, and do it all on a AA battery. All thanks to quantum mechanical effects. Led’s are based on concepts and properties that still sound more science fiction than science fact.
Heck, I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea!
Live video over the Internet. Should I still be amazed at this? Probably not. Am I still amazed at it? Yes.
Learning more about technology deepens this sensation. For example, I know how complex even a simple, cheap integrated circuit is. A thumb drive, for example, something a company might give away free, contains not only the storage hardware, which is a pretty impressive piece of hardware (hundreds of millions or billions of characters of storage, enough to stick a decent library in that useless little jeans pocket that was designed for a fragile and imprecise pocket watch) but a full-fledged computer, entire unto itself as far as logic and arithmetic go, with enough software to make the storage hardware useful to another computer.
That’s hundreds of millions or billions of transistors, easily, each of them sub-microscopic, joined in patterns complex enough to turn one arrangement into a general-purpose computer and another into a data store the likes of which wasn’t even dreamed of when the transistor was invented. The complexity encoded into these chips makes the Empire State Building look like Tinkertoys!
And we churn them out like boxes of cornflakes. And they work. You can stick one in your backpack and forget about it for a few months and it will still work afterwards, and it will still be storing whatever it was storing to begin with.
Others have mentioned it, but data storage stills blows my mind. When I began my programming career in 1988, my company’s computer was an IBM DOS mainframe. Our disk storage devices were IBM 3380s, which were about the size of portable toilet, cost about $100,000 each, and had a storage capacity of about 2.5 gigabytes. We used thousands of magnetic tapes in our processing because disk storage was so expensive. Now I can buy a 1 terabyte drive for $70 that is about the size of a sandwich. A small sandwich. And a 16 gig flash drive is $20.
This is old news by now, but Internet shopping still amazes me.
Years ago I was dreading Christmas shopping for my brother’s family. Go out to the mall, decide on the perfect gifts for five people, lug it all home, wrap it, tag it, find a big box to ship it in, pad the box, address it, and lug it to the post office.
In 30 minutes I had the Internet do all of that for me.
You can even run them through the wash more than once and they still work. Sadly, if you don’t catch them, the dryer does seem to kill them.
Don’t ask how I know this. :s
Thisis what I use in my car as a hard drive. The whole thing fits in the space of a nickle and only a 1/4 inch sticks out of the stereo. 16 gb would be about 12 continuous days of music.
I hunted this down after snapping off a traditional memory stick attached to my laptop.
The thing that blows my mind is that the overwhelming majority of people reading this post can, when they’re hungry, pick up an object, speak a few words, and food is brought to them from miles away. If delivery pizza isn’t the pinnacle of civilization, I don’t know what is.