On the Horizon

Over a century ago a man said "everything that can be invented has" and well.... we all know how wrong he was. I took a moment to consider though just how wrong he was and decided I should elaborate on everything I can think of that has been invented more or less since my grandmothers time. Be prepared, it's quite a list and is in no particular order and is most likely very incomplete and redundant.

the move from party line telephones to individual numbers, rotary phones, touch tone, voip, records, color pictures, personal film reels, vhs, dvd, blu ray,  8 track, cassette, cd, mp3 players, computers from vacuum tube to integrated circuit, the internet and everything to do with it, wifi, bullet trains, TV's both black and white as well as color and subsequent improvements like LCD's, refrigerators, microwaves, toasters, surround sound, possibly popcorn at the very least microwavable popcorn, VIDEO GAMES!!!, stop lights, probably the assembly line and minimum wage, again I'm not so sure how old my grandma really was I want to say born in 1927 but I'm not looking everything up for exact dates, the astronomical advances in medicine not including what I'll count as stand alones like x-rays and MRI's, satellites, possibly pyrex and plastic, hydroponic plant growing, possibly pesticides? at least modern effective ones, jet engines, genetics, the FDA, pasteurization, modern physics, the federal reserve and FIAT currency, solar energy panels, most modern weapons and military use chemicals, and so much more.

Just consider how big a difference the integrated circuit has made, going even from DOS to the various stages of windows, mac, linux, and everything the net has provided in that time from streaming, search engines like google, information repositories like wikipedia, email, twitter, facebook, any other social media, this blog, when it comes down to it look at everything around you and consider how much of it relies on something quite literally invented within the last century. We've come a long way in tech alone and we're going to go a lot further.

As it is right now developing research in FPGA chips even promise to replace CPU's or add new sections to motherboards prompting complete redesign in which we might see processing power explode in ways we can't even properly conceive right now. Just one FPGA chip running at only 25mhz when put to the specialized task it's programmed for can absolutely destroy a CPU at the world record of +8ghz. The beauty of FPGA's is that they can be reprogrammed fairly quickly and in theory could have a series of profiles based on each program you intend to use doing for computational processing what SSD's did for hard drives, redefine what speed is.

Where HDD's use to be rated by rpm's and avg seek time you now have SSD's completely obliterating them in terms of read/write and with no rpm's and no noise and ever increasing capacity, the real test now is IOPS and MTBF, which respectively is operations a second and meantime between failure.

The future of tech is changing so fast that to try and comprehend where we'll be in another century is nearly incomprehensible, and yet I almost bet we still won't have flying cars. The real task will be to keep up with the programming needs to utilize this new found power and speed and provide it to the masses. Hopefully someone will use it to design a new power source for the world that's clean, effective, reusable, renewable, and can be used to completely replace oil in every area and is so cost effective and easy to adopt that by the time the car companies have the first cars out it'll already be everywhere and not using it would be insane. I also can't wait for my personal robot butler with fully functional VI (virtual intelligence).