What's new since 1950?

Clarke admitted that he didn’t really invent something he couldn’t implement. In any case Edward Hale (I think) had a story called “The Brick Moon” in the late 19th century about a satellite, and George O. Smith was writing about communications satellites (of the Sun, not Earth) in the early 1940s.

ICs are not just applications of computers, but fundamentally different things which go into computers. By volume, far more ICs go into things like cars, appliances, and even greeting cards than go into computers.
Other fundamental inventions are core memory (now obsolete but vital) transistor memory, hard disks, and networking.

They were just being lazy. There was computer chess, on a screen in 2001, and I was playing with MUDs and multiplayer games in the mid-70s. But I agree that they count as inventions - Shannon did his first work on computer chess not long after 1950.

cough cough Lady Lovelace. As for sharing, the 360 series and the clones were exactly for this reason. Recompiling was nothing new, the emulation modes on the 360s were put in to eliminate the need for it. Fortran stems from the middle 1950s. Recompiling back then was not as much of an issue since people used a lot fewer system calls than they do today.

Biotechnologies.

ahem
Phonovision, the first analogue videodisc, dates from 1927. Granted, it was a marginal failure at the time, but it worked well enough as a proof of concept.

Nuclear fission power plants.

Rock n Roll, baby.

A plethora of novel pharmaceuticals.

Stem cell research and applications.

Holography.

And probably very soon, quantum computing.

Nanotechnology.

Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM).

MRIs.

Nope. Wikipedia:

The Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor (Hungarian name: Gábor Dénes),[1][2] was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 “for his invention and development of the holographic method”.[3] His work, done in the late 1940s, built on pioneering work in the field of X-ray microscopy by other scientists including Mieczysław Wolfke in 1920 and WL Bragg in 1939.[4] The discovery was an unexpected result of research into improving electron microscopes at the British Thomson-Houston Company in Rugby, England, and the company filed a patent in December 1947 (patent GB685286).

One of those fuzzy definitions. But okay, how 'bout 3D holography? It wasn’t until the development of the laser, using pure, coherent light, that 3D holography finally became a reality. The first 3D hologram (1964).

The heart and lung machine (Cardiopulmonary Bypass) was invented in 1951.

This made possible open heart surgery and heart transplants/artificial hearts.

You missed the point. Home video is not the same as video recording.

Movies and television obviously existed before 1950 and obviously there had to be means of recording them in studios.

But what didn’t exist in 1950 was a means of marketing these recordings to home viewers.

I wasn’t talking about inventing DNA, but the final determination of its structure - which is leading to amazing things. Such as:

It is very likely that we have barely scratched the surface here.

The wonders of modern technology.

In the recently re-booted Superman #1, Jimmy Olsen sourly refers to his cell phone as “my personal stalker.” Such appreciation for modern technology. :stuck_out_tongue:

Bah, my grandfather was doing that as a youngster after he was out of his diapers.

Oh, wait.

I often think of that when watching Star Wars. The entire movie depends on the ideas that, (a) The Empire is trying to get the Death Star plans back. Nowadays, we understand that once some information is “out there”, it is never coming back. And (b) The plans that need to be transported to the rebel base need to be contained in something the size of a trash compactor. The idea of duplicating them and sending via any other method are not considered.

Not that they would use a cell phone exactly, but it seems strange that our idea of data transmission is so advanced to theirs.

Not to get too off-topic, but you can read this a couple ways:

  1. “Get plans back” doesn’t mean the Empire has no copies of the plans, it just means he wants the data storage with the plans destroyed to ensure the Rebels have no plans. (Imagine we lost a copy of the F-35 plans to a spy working for Iran. We’d say “get the plans back” even if we had numerous other copies of the plans.)

  2. The Death Star is pretty big. Maybe the plans are like 500 picobytes, and that amount of data would take weeks to transmit over their com links. We don’t know for sure.

On the other hand it had characters playing all sorts of roleplaying games in the holodeck with eachother. Of course Star Trek: Voyager had a scene where Neelix, as Morale Officer, is charged with delivering correspondence from the Delta Quadrant to the crew. Which he does by carrying buckets of PADDs all over the ship. :smack:

I presume a lot of R2D2’s memory was overwritten with the plans. Might explain some of his charming, but almost childish behavior, and maybe why the eccentric C-3PO befriended it.

Besides, it had a bad motivator.

Magnetic resonance imaging
CAD/CAM manufacturing