The Path of Technology


 

After things happen, we tend to take it for granted that they already did. That might sound a little confusing, so let’s clarify for a second. The phrase hindsight is twenty twenty is a good introduction to this idea. Say, for a second, that we knock a carton of milk over and it spills on your phone. An incident like this isn’t going to be fun, after all, but after it we tend to say things like well I should have known better. This is all well and good but you have to remember that not everything in life occurs like this. There are some times and some experiences that you can just never see coming no matter how hard you could have tried and you just have to accept these circumstances in life for what they are. It is of no use to worry about them after the fact because there was no way you could have known what was going to happen beforehand. This doesn’t just apply to small scale events, either but large scale ones, too. A lot of times we fret and worry about history, about it could have been one way and not the other but the truth remains there are so many things that happen that no one could have really predicated. This also doesn’t just apply to bad things either but good things have arrived in our lives, or the lives of a nation collectively and changed them for the better. You might wonder what a positive example of that might be. It is an abstract idea, after all, and it is hard to picture at the best of times. Let’s take the invention of the microwave, for instance. Now, most people don’t know this but the microwave wasn’t just some targeted and focus tested invention that popped into people’s lives without any warning at all. That might seem like how it is but that’s just not how it is at all. Very few people know that the microwave was actually a product of various inventions being cobbled and coalesced together after they were already separately invented. In fact, it was a good deal of NASA inventions they cobbled together to invent and start marketing the first few microwaves. The microwave as an invention would not have happened otherwise. It simply would not exist without these specific series of invents and ideas that by no means had to happen. They simply did. Now let’s look at another example of this in a little more depth.
The Cell Phone As It Is Today
Actually, the cell phone, along with usb 2.0 cables, hdmi to dvi cables, the ethernet and bulk usb cables in general, would not have existed without advancements made by the space program in the sixties and seventies. The first primitive communications software that NASA used contained enough commercial potential that several entrepreneurs from the industry saw the possibilities and ran with them. They knew that there was a booming communications market with emerging technologies and wanted to capitalize on it. Nowadays, cell phones and other digital sharing devices are quite common but they would have never existed without the explicit and internal help of a small group of women and men who were devoted to pushing these technologies into the mainstream. They did this so ardently, in fact, that communications and cellular technology now form a backbone core component of American industry. Whether it be from bulk usb cables, digital television or social media, communications are an enormous industry that dominates many other smaller ones. But the most intriguing part of this entire cultural arc is that there was nothing requiring it to happen. We look at cell phones, bulk usb cables, things like bulk usb cables and other helpful communication technologies and we think that there was just some magic hand that waved over a pile of components and magically invented our high tech modern world but this simply is not the truth. It took a lot of work to make our world the way it is and it could have easily been something else. But it was cellular technology and now we live within this specific reality.

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