Simplification of Physics: Evolution of technology (small)

Technology evolved hand in hand with the evolution of modern man as he tamed nature and mimicked it.

First he built toys and the toys eventually turned into weapons for hunting and defending and then for fighting and conquering. Then they evolved into tools which were used to make more toys.

Complex technology based on silicon, the main atom making stones, evolved in the same pace as complex life based on carbon, the main atom making life. Just like man evolved from cellular life, computer technology evolved from the stone. The Stone Age evolved very slowly, taking 20,000 years or 80% of the total time to reach bronze and the abacus. To reach iron took another 1,500 years or 7%. To reach the steam engine took practically all the rest of the time. We have had the computer for only 0.2% of the time we have been here on earth. Cellular life took 2 billion years to evolve into mammals or about 80% of time and mammals took the rest to evolve into man. Man has been around for only 0.001% of the time.

If the appearance of cellular life 2.5 billion years ago marked the beginning of an imaginary day and the “present now” marked the midnight of that day, then each second corresponds to 30,000 years.

The dinosaurs appeared at 9:45 in the evening,
modern man with his Stone Age technology appeared 1 second before midnight,.
the Bronze Age and the abacus were introduced 1/10 of second before midnight,
the steam engine started 1/100 of a second ago and
the first electronic computer started churning out bits of data 1 millisecond ago.

If the appearance of modern man 25,000 years ago marked the beginning of an imaginary day and the “present now” marked the midnight of that day, then each second corresponds to 100 days, and 1 minute to 20 years.

The Bronze Age and the abacus appeared at 7:50 in the evening.
The steam engine started 10 minutes to midnight and
the first computer turned on just 3 minutes ago.
Every few seconds a new generation of technology is born into the world.

When I started university in 1970, one of the things I had to bring with me was a slide rule. It was always with me and never ran out of power. By sliding the middle part of the ruler and the cursor to the right positions, I could do all the calculations that are now made using a pocket calculator.

The University had a computer center with a computer that cost millions of dollars. It took up an entire floor of a building and required a team of people to run it. The room had to be air-conditioned to keep all the equipment from heating up.

When we were given an assignment, for example to write a program to convert weight values from pounds to kilograms, then we had to type every line of that program in a machine that punched holes in paper cards, a card for every line. We submitted our pack of punched cards to the computer center and anxiously hoped it would come back without errors the following day, otherwise we had to re submit it and wait till the next day for the new results.

When there were no more mistakes, the computer rewarded us by printing out on a roll of folded paper of our work that we handed in to be marked.

By 1975, computer kits were available for the first time that could be built by soldering components on a circuit board. Someone at the gas pipeline company I worked for came up with an ingenious idea. Instead of driving 500km to a remote station to close a valve along the gas pipeline, sensors measuring the temperatures and pressures and gas flows could be used by these primitive board computers to control the valves automatically. Most thought him a little foolhardy and opposed his ideas, but he was able to convince the company to give his project a try.

My job was to write and test the programs and punch them out on rolls of paper tapes. Then I had to drive to these remote stations and install these computers. Every letter and document that I wrote took a few days.

First I had to write it by hand so that the secretary could type it and send it out by express post which took 2- 3 days to deliver.

By 1985, the very first computers for consumers that were not in a build yourself kit form became available. One was called Sinclair 1000 and cost under 100$. It was the size of a book with a miniature key board and it was ready to use from the box. An ordinary TV was used as a monitor and a cassette player was used for the memory. I bought one and copied all the data from a nutrition table and wrote a program that calculated the amount of nutrients in a meal. Then I wrote a program to print out the data in a bar graph form. What took me days to do before; I was able to do in a matter of a few hours. But writing the programs to do that took me a few months of working all night long.

By 1990, I had my own computer in my office for writing text and for doing drawings. My computer had a spreadsheet program called Excel. What took me a few hours to do with my Sinclair 1000 at home, the office computer did much better and nicer in a few minutes. Instead of cassettes for memory, my new office computer used floppy disks, and a few years later, mini discs which could store a lot more data and transfer it a lot faster.

The television, a furniture that got bigger and heavier exchanged its rabbit ear antenna for a cable, sat near the couch and stayed there. The telephone, a light hand held device that got smaller and lighter cut its copper line bonds, changed it for an antenna, took to the air and became mobile.

Within 30 years, computers ran 1,000 times faster, communicated with 100,000 times greater bandwidth and stored 1,000,000 times more information.

This exponential trend, characterized as Moore’s Law, cannot go on forever and is limited by the size of the atom, as an atom can not be divided into smaller parts without destroying it. At today’s pace, that should be reached in 10-20 years.

So get ready for an increases of 1,000 before we get to Yota and hit that wall.

A trillion is a very big number.

You can visualize it with piles of money. A million dollars in $100 bills fits into a shopping bag. A billion dollars fits in a truck. And a trillion dollars needs a huge ware house.

Technology runs parallel to nature usually mimicking it. Many times technology is much superior to nature. But not always.