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1955 versus 2012

1 November 2012

Yesterday I was cleaning out the workshop and took a moment to browse through a 1955 edition of Popular Mechanics magazine.

What I read was eye-opening and shows just how little yet how far we have come in the 57 years since the magazine was published.

Here are but a couple of interesting snippets from that edition...

Headline: Drop in Ocean Temperatures Indicates Earth Cooling

Yes, that's right folks, these were the pre-global warming years and this brief article predicts that "temperate-zone cities such as Chicago, Berlin and Moscow may be buried under 1000 feet of ice in a comparatively short time, geologically speaking, according to Cesare Emiliani of the University of Chicago"

Apparently, Emiliani's studies showed that the earth is getting colder and he predicted that at the (then) current rate, glaciers would cover the named cities in as little as 10,000 years.

My, how times change!

A little further on there's this headline: Brainy Computer

"Billed by its makers as the smartest electronic brain ever built is a giant computer called the NORC, for Naval Ordinance Research Calculator... it can perform 15,000 arithmetical operations a second, or a billion in less than 24 hours. This is the equivalent of a thousand persons calculating on paper for a lifetime."

Oh boy... and now we have $7 ARM processors that can perform tens of millions of calculations per second this month and the Titan" supercomputer will be commissioned with a top speed of 20 petaFLOPS (20,000,000,000,000,000).

My, how times change!

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how many people's lifetimes worth of calculation that is.

And there was a picture of a 1955 version of the speed camera with this description:

"Two strips of tape are stretched across the pavement opposite the parked [camera] car. As each passing car runs over the two tapes, its speed is automatically computed and if it is above the legal limit, another automatic device sets off a stroboscopic flash lamp, exposing the film in a 35-millimeter camera atop parked car [sic]"

Hmmm... it seems that some things *never* change!

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