It's strange how this article was written as if the author doesn't realize that there are more things than just power/speed dictating what it means for a technology to be successful. Technology like the Concorde or Bugatti Veyron wasn't taken away from us, it was just rendered obsolete.
What killed the Concorde? Broadband Internet. Who needs to fly to Europe all the time if you can just video chat? The Concorde is noisy, uncomfortable, and highly polluting. If one could make a better version of the Concorde I'm sure people would be into it...but really the "big win" of using this jet was that you got somewhere a couple hours faster, and it cost 3x the normal price of an airline. What normal person would really be doing this?
What killed the Bugatti Veyron? I guess this one is a general sense of "YAGNI", because seriously who gives a shit. The car doesn't look all that nice, who cares if it can go real fast. Fast engines are not what makes good cars, there are lots of other factors involved.
I’d argue that the 70s oil crises killed Concorde. It was basically DOA. It limped along for decades having built only 12 airplanes and serving only two routes in the long term. It never really made money, roughly breaking even operationally but not paying back its R&D. It was ultimately a prestige project. It got that job done pretty well, but it was never successful in a way that would persist.
The Veyron is an even more extreme example of that. It was intended to be a prestige product from the start. It wasn’t supposed to make money and it only gets produced until the company comes up with a different way to spend that marketing or research budget.
Edit: the Veyron is a particularly terrible example here because it was discontinued in favor of a new model that's even more insane. The Veyron was succeeded by the Chiron, which has an anticipated top speed of 288MPH, although it's currently electronically limited to "only" 261MPH. I don't see any way in which the Chiron is substantially inferior, so I don't see how it could possibly be an example of a major technological advance fading away.
Hark back to 1973 when Concorde production began and they had around 120 advance orders/options. Most of which evaporated because of not only the oil shock but, significantly, the discovery that the Boeing 747 (and other wide-bodies) could make huge amounts of revenue by carrying more passengers, cheaper. The 747 was originally expected to be a cargo freighter, once SSTs like Concorde ate the passenger market in the 80s, hence the high cockpit positioned over the nose door on the cargo variants.
Concorde was the last gasp of the idea that air travel was a very expensive form of transport for the elite, who would pay to save time over taking an ocean liner. Instead we got the democratization of air travel. It's no accident that the cruise liner died out as a normal form of international transport (as opposed to a recreational vehicle) at the same time that wide-body airliners caught on.
(Side-note: the plans for Concorde B are worth googling — an incremental upgrade with quieter engines and a range that could have stretched to 5000 miles, opening up a bunch more routes, and due to enter production by 1982.)
Graffiti: I used it and I don't miss it! While early on-screen multitouch keyboards sucked, what really makes Graffiti show its age is modern gesture-based systems like Swype or SwiftKey, where each word is a unique ideogram composed by dragging a finger across a QWERTY map in letter order. Graffiti typically took 2-3 gestures to enter a letter: with Swype I'm typically on 5-7 gestures per word, which overall is much faster (average word length in English is 5.5 letters). Graffiti has in fact been ported to iOS and Android ... but relatively few people use it because times have moved on.
Yeah, ultimately the Concorde failed because it was worst-in-class for the stuff that turned out to actually matter (cost per revenue passenger km, noise, range)
The "spruce goose" still holds the record for biggest wingspan of any aircraft and largest ever flying boat, and the Hindenberg class airships for largest ever aircraft (and probably least flight-like experience), and ultimately Concorde's speed turned out to be no more relevant to its commercial viability...
The US ban on supersonic overflight killed supersonic travel, and therefore Concorde. 1960s tech was only able to build planes that could go about 3500 nm, and a huge proportion of flights in that range at that time was transcontinental flights across North America. The cancellation of all American operator orders made the project impossible to break even.
The fuel costs were nasty, but not the end of the world. The existence of first class travel shows that there’s a market for expensive, inefficient long haul flights. If supersonic passenger flight had been able to survive American protectionism, it would have avoided missing out on the last 50 years of R&D, so SSTs today would have gotten much more efficient, just like today’s sub sonic jets have become.
-When RIM stopped making the blackberry 7520, which (paired with nextel, with push-to-talk) was the best phone, with the best UI, ever made. They made the phones
thinner, and shinier...and less useful in the process.
-Dropping 3.5mm headphone jacks, an example of a standard that works, and has worked, flawlessly, for a very long time (I know this horse is beaten to death).
-Getting rid of iPods for "iPod touch" (neutered iPhones)
Push to talk by Nextel had it's own allocated bandwidth. Bandwidth = MONEY, so they shut down PTT and sold the bandwidth.
In the manufacturing plant where I worked, we went from being almost able to understand people on Nextel PTT to completely unable to understand people with the software implementation. The plant has since switched to local walkie talkies with repeaters - with Nextel you could easily start chatting with anyone else on the network, pretty much anywhere.
Csours explained it. For a while, when nextel disappeared and the PTT bandwidth got reallocated, the other carriers tried to sell "PTT" as well, but it was contained in an app like Zello (or their own proprietary app).
Old Nextel PTT phones had dedicated hardware buttons specifically for it. So you didnt' have to unlock a phone, find the app, open it, etc. Your phone was a walkie talkie.
Because Nextel became Sprint, and Androids and iPhones are PCs with a telephone modem in them, not telephones with an app platform in them. Telephony has clearly taken a back seat, when's the last time you even heard a layman about "call quality"?
What's the appeal of push-to-talk? I can't really imagine it solves any problem I'm having; is it my lack of imagination or is a domain-specific thing, maybe some businesses that need it?
With a normal call, you follow typical social conventions of:
ringringringring
pickup
"Hello"
"Hey Morsch, what time are you doing $foo task by today?"
"Probably 6:30pm."
"Okay thanks."
"Do you need anything else?"
"No, that's it, I'll talk to you later."
"Alright bye."
"bye"
hangup
With PTT, there is a social convention surrounding it too that allows you to be much more abbreviated without coming across as rude:
chirp (being talking immediately and assume that morsch hears you
"MOrsch you out there?"
"Yeah what's up?"
"What time are you doing $foo"
"6:30"
"Thanks."
end.
PTT occupied a space between a phone call and an SMS/email. It was like SMS, but urgent, and you didn't need to pick up your phone and type a response.
It's the same reason logistics, stage production, building, etc. all use walkie-talkies instead of phones or SMS.
Concord moments are just parenthesis in the history of humanity. 5 years ago the electric car would have been on that list. Faster than sound planes will come back, it's just a matter of time and technology being mature enough for the product to be economically viable.
In 2002, when I got a call on my landline, the Caller ID would show the caller's name (either an individual's name, or their business) without my having to maintain any sort of contact list. The phone company would transmit this information to my phone's screen, populated from their own database.
I can't understand why an iPhone in 2017 lacks this feature.
My cell provider absolutely has my name. And the continued existence of phone books demonstrates that there's still a database of businesses and their phone numbers.
Google has this information, too: I can type the name of just about any local business into their web search or maps product and be given their phone number.
Apple has it too: I can launch Apple Maps on my iPhone, and it knows all the phone numbers of local businesses. I believe they get this information from Yelp.
> The cell providers don't [...] send the information with the call like your landline phone company does.
The value wasn’t zero; even with spoofing, there’s a big difference between “this unknown caller is camouflaging their name to something I don’t recognize” vs “Oh, it’s the dry cleaners; I’d better pick up.”
Caller ID was around for quite a while before 2002. It looks like the first companies rolled it out in the late 80's. But, it's funny that you chose 2002 because that's the year when phreakers learned how to spoof the system. It was always theoretically possible because phone companies would make test calls to customers with information like "BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (123)456-7890". In other words, it was obvious that the Caller ID system was trivial to manipulate.
Not convinced by that, I was a massive fan of that era's keyboard but having recently come back to the fold with a T470P (having use Dell's for most of a decade) I love it's keyboard as well (even the smaller function keys simply aren't an issue once I adapted to them).
I still have an old R series with the old style keyboard kicking around and I tried them side by side, it was (and is) a great keyboard but it's simply not better than the keyboard on the T470P in any way I actually care about.
A lot of these moments come from changing norms regarding risk-aversion and willingness to be inconvenienced.
For example, the airport-security experience reached its peak in August 2001 and will never be that good again. The Empire State Building was built in less than 14 months using 1930s technology, but only because of safety standards much more lax than we'd allow today (five construction workers died). In fact, a lot of great buildings could never be built today simply because of zoning restrictions about height and boxiness.
Another example is the NY subway system. Construction of the original line began in 1900 and was complete in 1904. A century later, it's taking about ten times as long to build the Second Avenue Subway. But a big part of that is that we used to just rip up the ground and inconvenience everyone nearby with yearlong street closures and dynamite vibrations. That doesn't fly anymore.
Surely airport security was at its peak before the 70s when they started actually screening things? Before that you just got on the plane.
On the topic of subways, I'm always fascinated by the example of Beijing's line 2. It was planned as a circular route approximately following the old city wall. They couldn't afford to bore the tunnel, and had to use cut-and-cover instead. This consists of digging a trench to the desired depth, then covering the top. Of course, this requires destroying whatever is on the surface there. This would have destroyed a lot of people's homes. But a solution was found: rather than approximately following the old city wall, how about exactly following the old city wall, and destroying that instead of people's houses? Nobody lives in it, after all. And thus Beijing's line 2 was born, and the centuries-old historic city wall is no more, aside from a few preserved gatehouses.
Imagine trying something like that in a place like New York City.
Surely airport security was at its peak before the 70s when they started actually screening things? Before that you just got on the plane.
Until 2001, you essentially just got on the plane. Oh, they made you walk through a metal detector, so take your keys out of your pocket. Other than that, walk right to the gate whether you hold a ticket or not. Don’t tell my wife this, but one of the pluses of increased security is I just dump her at the door now instead of parking he car and navigating the airport concourse just so I can give her a kiss seconds before she walks on the plane. And I don’t have to be waiting at the gate when she comes home. (I know, real sentimental guy I am. She’s fine with it, which is what matters.) OTOH, we did lose the ability to just go to the airport and watch planes take off. Yup, just drive to your local international airport, with no ticket and no money spent otherwise, go through the metal detector, pick a random terminal and watch them come and go. Leave your I. D. at home, no one will want to look at it.
I remember having the spouse come to a screeching stop in front of the airport 20 minutes before my flight, carry-on in hand, doing “an O. J.” (re: old commercial w/O. J. running through an airport to catch a plane). Made it, too.
They’d scan checked bags and carry-ones, but that was on a separate thread, so one didn’t notice most of the time.
In summary, yeah, it was slightly better before the hijackings of the 70s, but not by much IMO.
I’ve been flying roughly 10 times a year for the past 20 years. I also groan about many of the current show-for-theater mechanisms in airport security.
That said, I think the experience will reach new all-time highs in the next 10 years. I predict that it will eventually be like driving down a modern toll road. You’ll just walk through as various robots watch you and scan you. Then you’ll get pulled aside if you raise an alarm.
I gave a talk about this recently[1], mentioning the 2nd Avenue subway. Another point of comparison is that here in the UK, the entire National Rail network was effectively planned and built in 22 years. Almost 2 centuries ago. When London's Crosrail 2 comes online next year -- a single rail line -- it will have taken 78 years from start to finish.
It's not just safety standards: it's increasing complexity at every level of the project. Project management is an O(n^2) problem, with "O" being every new technical expert, community stakeholder, or regulator involved in the process. Many of whom are there for truly excellent reasons, but nonetheless it means civilisation has gotten a couple orders of magnitude worse at executing large projects, in terms of both time and money.
The decline of HyperCard was a Concorde moment for me.
HyperCard was a brilliant tool that allowed anybody to produce interactive software. It had a pretty simple model (stacks of cards) and could be used to build databases, presentations, or games. It was never updated with proper color support, so people lost interest.
Nothing ever came close to the simplicity and power of Hypercard.
> In the end, it turned out to be too noisy, too polluting, and too expensive, never really making money.
Thus I think "Concorde moment" is really misnomer. A technological solution is always a balance, and if your balance tips the wrong way, your solution sucks. That's the hard reality of what engineers have to deal with.
Indeed, and I would frame this story as more the construction and operation of the Concorde was more ahead of it's time than it's grounding a step backwards.
The way I see it: there is simply not enough wealth accumulated to keep these flights running. Perhaps in a future world were aviation kerosene is cheaper, engines more efficient, and airframe and power plant maintenance more heavily automated, we'll see a revival of supersonic transportation. Until then, I'd rather airlines not bleed money keeping these planes flying. One might get teary-eye'd over the shuttering of the program, but more efficient allocation of resources is a real cause for celebration!
The notion of "'progress' at all costs" is an insane one.
VoIP is my Concord moment. The telco provider forced virtually all customers to do their phone calls through VoIP, instead of the ordinary old phone network. Every other week my router sends me an E-Mail about a call that failed, service unavailabilities and so on. There were even widespread outages that affected whole states.
In terms of the plain old phone lines, I cannot think of a single outage in the past 20 years. It even worked when power supply itself failed.
The Concorde was a project that could have only happened due to the lavish government spending by Britain and France, as well as the tying in of national pride. It made no economic sense at all, and they hardly made any of them.
The 20707 Boeing effort was more practical, but had the same genesis as the Concorde. It was also canned once the US pulled the funding and the oil shocks showed it would likely never be profitable. At least they stopped throwing good money after bad.
The 747 was considerably more practical, and completely demolished the competition for years. It was the result of Pan Am (which owned the international flight scene at the time) coming to Boeing with real requirements, instead of just national pride, for a much larger jet. Boeing also decided to make it possible for it to be a freighter as well.
54 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadRethinkDB comes to mind.
In the vein of palm pilot: The Apple Knewton.
What killed the Concorde? Broadband Internet. Who needs to fly to Europe all the time if you can just video chat? The Concorde is noisy, uncomfortable, and highly polluting. If one could make a better version of the Concorde I'm sure people would be into it...but really the "big win" of using this jet was that you got somewhere a couple hours faster, and it cost 3x the normal price of an airline. What normal person would really be doing this?
What killed the Bugatti Veyron? I guess this one is a general sense of "YAGNI", because seriously who gives a shit. The car doesn't look all that nice, who cares if it can go real fast. Fast engines are not what makes good cars, there are lots of other factors involved.
The Veyron is an even more extreme example of that. It was intended to be a prestige product from the start. It wasn’t supposed to make money and it only gets produced until the company comes up with a different way to spend that marketing or research budget.
Edit: the Veyron is a particularly terrible example here because it was discontinued in favor of a new model that's even more insane. The Veyron was succeeded by the Chiron, which has an anticipated top speed of 288MPH, although it's currently electronically limited to "only" 261MPH. I don't see any way in which the Chiron is substantially inferior, so I don't see how it could possibly be an example of a major technological advance fading away.
Concorde was the last gasp of the idea that air travel was a very expensive form of transport for the elite, who would pay to save time over taking an ocean liner. Instead we got the democratization of air travel. It's no accident that the cruise liner died out as a normal form of international transport (as opposed to a recreational vehicle) at the same time that wide-body airliners caught on.
(Side-note: the plans for Concorde B are worth googling — an incremental upgrade with quieter engines and a range that could have stretched to 5000 miles, opening up a bunch more routes, and due to enter production by 1982.)
Graffiti: I used it and I don't miss it! While early on-screen multitouch keyboards sucked, what really makes Graffiti show its age is modern gesture-based systems like Swype or SwiftKey, where each word is a unique ideogram composed by dragging a finger across a QWERTY map in letter order. Graffiti typically took 2-3 gestures to enter a letter: with Swype I'm typically on 5-7 gestures per word, which overall is much faster (average word length in English is 5.5 letters). Graffiti has in fact been ported to iOS and Android ... but relatively few people use it because times have moved on.
The "spruce goose" still holds the record for biggest wingspan of any aircraft and largest ever flying boat, and the Hindenberg class airships for largest ever aircraft (and probably least flight-like experience), and ultimately Concorde's speed turned out to be no more relevant to its commercial viability...
http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html
The fuel costs were nasty, but not the end of the world. The existence of first class travel shows that there’s a market for expensive, inefficient long haul flights. If supersonic passenger flight had been able to survive American protectionism, it would have avoided missing out on the last 50 years of R&D, so SSTs today would have gotten much more efficient, just like today’s sub sonic jets have become.
Transatlantic flights have increased in frequency since broadband. There is tremendous value in face-to-face meetings.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167453
-When RIM stopped making the blackberry 7520, which (paired with nextel, with push-to-talk) was the best phone, with the best UI, ever made. They made the phones thinner, and shinier...and less useful in the process.
-Dropping 3.5mm headphone jacks, an example of a standard that works, and has worked, flawlessly, for a very long time (I know this horse is beaten to death).
-Getting rid of iPods for "iPod touch" (neutered iPhones)
In the manufacturing plant where I worked, we went from being almost able to understand people on Nextel PTT to completely unable to understand people with the software implementation. The plant has since switched to local walkie talkies with repeaters - with Nextel you could easily start chatting with anyone else on the network, pretty much anywhere.
Old Nextel PTT phones had dedicated hardware buttons specifically for it. So you didnt' have to unlock a phone, find the app, open it, etc. Your phone was a walkie talkie.
ring ring ring ring
pickup
"Hello"
"Hey Morsch, what time are you doing $foo task by today?"
"Probably 6:30pm."
"Okay thanks."
"Do you need anything else?"
"No, that's it, I'll talk to you later."
"Alright bye."
"bye"
hangup
With PTT, there is a social convention surrounding it too that allows you to be much more abbreviated without coming across as rude:
chirp (being talking immediately and assume that morsch hears you
"MOrsch you out there?"
"Yeah what's up?"
"What time are you doing $foo"
"6:30"
"Thanks."
end.
PTT occupied a space between a phone call and an SMS/email. It was like SMS, but urgent, and you didn't need to pick up your phone and type a response.
It's the same reason logistics, stage production, building, etc. all use walkie-talkies instead of phones or SMS.
PTT was that sort of goodness, but it was global.
I don't understand -- are you saying that at some point prior to 2012, electric cars had been in frequent use, and then that stopped at some point?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
I can't understand why an iPhone in 2017 lacks this feature.
Google has this information, too: I can type the name of just about any local business into their web search or maps product and be given their phone number.
Apple has it too: I can launch Apple Maps on my iPhone, and it knows all the phone numbers of local businesses. I believe they get this information from Yelp.
> The cell providers don't [...] send the information with the call like your landline phone company does.
Exactly. Why not?
That resulted in cold callers camouflaging themselves using either suppressed or incorrect phone numbers, reducing the value of called ID to zero.
It's equivalent to someone shouting through your door "Open up, this is the police". You would not do that without a chain or peephole, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing
I still have an old R series with the old style keyboard kicking around and I tried them side by side, it was (and is) a great keyboard but it's simply not better than the keyboard on the T470P in any way I actually care about.
For example, the airport-security experience reached its peak in August 2001 and will never be that good again. The Empire State Building was built in less than 14 months using 1930s technology, but only because of safety standards much more lax than we'd allow today (five construction workers died). In fact, a lot of great buildings could never be built today simply because of zoning restrictions about height and boxiness.
Another example is the NY subway system. Construction of the original line began in 1900 and was complete in 1904. A century later, it's taking about ten times as long to build the Second Avenue Subway. But a big part of that is that we used to just rip up the ground and inconvenience everyone nearby with yearlong street closures and dynamite vibrations. That doesn't fly anymore.
On the topic of subways, I'm always fascinated by the example of Beijing's line 2. It was planned as a circular route approximately following the old city wall. They couldn't afford to bore the tunnel, and had to use cut-and-cover instead. This consists of digging a trench to the desired depth, then covering the top. Of course, this requires destroying whatever is on the surface there. This would have destroyed a lot of people's homes. But a solution was found: rather than approximately following the old city wall, how about exactly following the old city wall, and destroying that instead of people's houses? Nobody lives in it, after all. And thus Beijing's line 2 was born, and the centuries-old historic city wall is no more, aside from a few preserved gatehouses.
Imagine trying something like that in a place like New York City.
Until 2001, you essentially just got on the plane. Oh, they made you walk through a metal detector, so take your keys out of your pocket. Other than that, walk right to the gate whether you hold a ticket or not. Don’t tell my wife this, but one of the pluses of increased security is I just dump her at the door now instead of parking he car and navigating the airport concourse just so I can give her a kiss seconds before she walks on the plane. And I don’t have to be waiting at the gate when she comes home. (I know, real sentimental guy I am. She’s fine with it, which is what matters.) OTOH, we did lose the ability to just go to the airport and watch planes take off. Yup, just drive to your local international airport, with no ticket and no money spent otherwise, go through the metal detector, pick a random terminal and watch them come and go. Leave your I. D. at home, no one will want to look at it.
I remember having the spouse come to a screeching stop in front of the airport 20 minutes before my flight, carry-on in hand, doing “an O. J.” (re: old commercial w/O. J. running through an airport to catch a plane). Made it, too.
They’d scan checked bags and carry-ones, but that was on a separate thread, so one didn’t notice most of the time.
In summary, yeah, it was slightly better before the hijackings of the 70s, but not by much IMO.
That said, I think the experience will reach new all-time highs in the next 10 years. I predict that it will eventually be like driving down a modern toll road. You’ll just walk through as various robots watch you and scan you. Then you’ll get pulled aside if you raise an alarm.
And ... Blenderized? Soylent green is people!
It's not just safety standards: it's increasing complexity at every level of the project. Project management is an O(n^2) problem, with "O" being every new technical expert, community stakeholder, or regulator involved in the process. Many of whom are there for truly excellent reasons, but nonetheless it means civilisation has gotten a couple orders of magnitude worse at executing large projects, in terms of both time and money.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-ygQC1oKQE
HyperCard was a brilliant tool that allowed anybody to produce interactive software. It had a pretty simple model (stacks of cards) and could be used to build databases, presentations, or games. It was never updated with proper color support, so people lost interest.
Nothing ever came close to the simplicity and power of Hypercard.
Thus I think "Concorde moment" is really misnomer. A technological solution is always a balance, and if your balance tips the wrong way, your solution sucks. That's the hard reality of what engineers have to deal with.
The way I see it: there is simply not enough wealth accumulated to keep these flights running. Perhaps in a future world were aviation kerosene is cheaper, engines more efficient, and airframe and power plant maintenance more heavily automated, we'll see a revival of supersonic transportation. Until then, I'd rather airlines not bleed money keeping these planes flying. One might get teary-eye'd over the shuttering of the program, but more efficient allocation of resources is a real cause for celebration!
The notion of "'progress' at all costs" is an insane one.
The 20707 Boeing effort was more practical, but had the same genesis as the Concorde. It was also canned once the US pulled the funding and the oil shocks showed it would likely never be profitable. At least they stopped throwing good money after bad.
The 747 was considerably more practical, and completely demolished the competition for years. It was the result of Pan Am (which owned the international flight scene at the time) coming to Boeing with real requirements, instead of just national pride, for a much larger jet. Boeing also decided to make it possible for it to be a freighter as well.
The 747 was the truly revolutionary plane.
Gnome 1 -> Gnome 2. Some people just wanted Gnome 1 with antialiased fonts
Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3. Just when Gnome 2 got as useful as Gnome 1, bubye Gnome 2.
NNTP -> expertsexchange/slashdot
Eudora -> yahoo mail
Not all of these were permanent.