Head Tale

A fun discussion on Reddit, even with 85% of the answers being computers, cell phones or airplanes.

“Reaching the Moon was certainly a highlight for our civilization,
but it was a singular accomplishment. The one technological thing that
most blows my mind is the one which made that lunar landing possible,
is the civilization's greatest technical achievement of all, which is
repeated every single day, and which is remarkably overlooked.

I refer, of course, to the computer, but not the computer itself as
an artifact. Rather, the industrial nature of the computer. The
computer is, far and away, the single-most sophisticated artifact human
beings have created to date. But that's not the amazing bit. The
amazing bit is that, in a span of one generation, this machine went
from being a big as a house and costing as much as -and being made in
much the same way as- the Space Shuttle to a ubiquitous mass-produced
device you can put in your pocket, has increased exponentially in
performance as it shrank, is so simple in composition that you can
teach a child to assemble one in an hour, and is so cheap that even
people who can't afford a home or a car can afford a computer more
powerful than the ones that put men on the Moon.

And that's just the half of it. This is the first whole-world
industrial product. With a just a little information, anyone can
mail-order the parts for an entire PC, with no two parts coming from
the same company or even the same part of the world, and you can put it
together and -at least 9 times out of 10- it will run the first time
you switch it on! There is no other device or product in the world you
can say this about, though as a trend many other types of products are
today heading in this direction.

But none of this is the mind-blowing part. The mind-blowing part is
that few to none of the people running the major corporations that
contributed to this astounding feat have more than a very rudimentary
comprehension of how this happened or how the industry today actually
works -which is why they keep making many of the same dumb executive
decisions over and over again. They don't see the forest for the trees.
This radically different industrial paradigm -this vast interdependent
'industrial ecology' of otherwise competitive international companies-
evolved almost entirely ad hoc, driven by a near-religious conviction
in the potential of the technology by a small community of technorati
and the need to cope with a technology too complicated and expensive
for any one company alone -not even IBM- to develop in isolation. This
is the single greatest accomplishment of the Industrial Age -and it was
largely accidental.”