A Technology That Died And A Technology That Thrived

Sadly the mark of progress is the passing of the old, as the saying goes “Out with the old and in with the new”, and in the case of technology it is especially relevant. In many cases a technology came along that acted as a stopgap, but that technology had a limit and to improve upon it a new technology had to be introduced, like for example in the case of Dial-up internet and Broadband.


Dial-up internet

Its predecessor, USENET, invented in 1979 by Tom Truscott a computer scientist who co-created Usenet and Steve Bellovin a computer networking security researcher, a system that allowed dial-up to transfer data through telephone modems.

It was a genius idea not only was it cheap to implement, but it also didn’t require any additional infrastructure built if the location already had the Telephone network connected, a number of articles claim that it was a truly important step in the direction of cheap and accessible internet for everyone. But sadly for Dial-up internet, it reached its peak of development around the 1990s and in came broadband to replace it, with its superior speed but with the requirment of building new infrastructure, still it eventually did. There are some exceptions to this, for example in places it would be too expensive to build new infrastructure, for example in remote or isolated areas, they still have to rely upon it.


GPS

Now GPS is a good example of a technology that is a base, something that can only be improved upon and not replaced, a reason why it is still used almost by everyone. The GPS as we know it was launched from the United States in 1973, it was a combination of multiple ideas and technology that were developed previously, including some classified materials and designs. Initially designed for the military, with only 24 satellites lunched in the beginning, but it was opened to the public in the 1980s.

The creation of the GPS is mainly credited to Roger L. Easton a physicist who before his work on the GPS designed the Naval Space Surveillance System, Ivan A. Getting a physicist and electrical engineer who before his work created the SCR-584 radar that was one of the most advanced ground-based radars at the time, and Bradford Parkinson an engineer and inventor who served in the United States Air Force as a Colonel after getting recalled from his job as a professor at Stanford University.

The design of the GPS was heavily based upon LORAN and Decca Navigator, similar ground based technology that was used for navigation before the GPS.

Another important name that must be mentioned Friedwardt Winterberg who help prevent an error before it even became a problem, due to special and general relativity he predicted that the clocks on the GPS satellites would be 38ms faster per day than the clocks on Earth, which would have quickly accumulated into an error that would have added 10 km of inaccuracy per day, not something that precise military maneuvers would have been able to tolerate.


Now I’m certain that in the future we will see technologies that we believe to be unshakable in their respective specialists be thrown off their thrones, an example would be PCs and Laptops, some say that VR headsets will soon be light and comfortable enough to replace them. So we must not get sad for the passage of old technologies, but be happy of the progress that is done.

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