5 ms·

> "I would find this amazing today, and all of this happened in the 1960s!" If bowling alleys didn't already exist... and you pitched me the idea of fully auto

> "I would find this amazing today, and all of this happened in the 1960s!" If bowling alleys didn't already exist... and you pitched me the idea of fully automated systems to collect and re-rack pins and return 15-lb balls to the player after each and every throw... I would probably say that's either impossible or at least impractical at scale. 19th and 20th century engineering is amazing. Today, if I can't conceive of writing it as a mobile app than I just shrug.

wlesieutre 8y ago
I have a feeling that a lot of people today, confronted with the problem of designing a bowling alley, would go straight for a video camera, a robotic arm to pick up the pins and put them back in their spots, and machine learning to glue it together. I wonder how the cost, reliability, and speed of that would compare to the mechanical solutions. There are a couple bowling alley rerack machine horror stories somewhere on r/talesfromtechsupport.
- cirgue 8y ago
  Today, the focus seems to be on making sure that a product/system is easy to modify, integrate, or tear down completely instead of saying 'we need to build a system that can do x and only ever x really fast and cheap for a long time". We don't build three-decade systems in the tech industry, we build six-month systems.
  - balabaster 8y ago
    What's crazy about that is that some of those 6 month systems, which were designed at the time to be a throwaway, just to get by, are still in production 26 years later and causing all kinds of problems.
  - mseebach 8y ago
    That's because we predominantly build software, which has the distinct benefit that it can be changed. If ten-pin bowling goes out of fashion in favour of eleven-pin bowling, your three-decade system goes in the landfill. Your six-month gets an OTA update.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- trhway 8y ago
  >I have a feeling that a lot of people today, confronted with the problem of designing a bowling alley, would go straight for a video camera, a robotic arm to pick up the pins and put them back in their spots, and machine learning to glue it together. plus stuffing the pins with IoT sensors and WiFi chips, i.e. making "smart pins", "smart ball", ... I wonder what stuff what is being done today (both kinds - known to public as well as classified) would look amazing in 2060.
  - fiveoak 8y ago
    I never thought I'd have to worry about bowling alley equipment DDoSing my servers, or having them mine monero
    - vertexFarm 8y ago
      The IoTIMCC: Internet of Things Illegitimately mining crypto currency
wil421 8y ago
Why stop at 19th and 20th centuries? I had the opportunity to go to Rome and seeing what the Romans created ~2000 years ago was astounding.
- auxbuss 8y ago
  Being in the UK, I can hop down the road and see what the Roman's were up to; as you say, astounding, and over such a wide geography. Then again, 4,500 years ago in Egypt they built some majestic structures.
  - wil421 8y ago
    Agreed. The things that fascinate me the most are how simalar we were to the Romans, or Greeks for that matter. Roads, society, government, and water utilities. Even just stitting in a bar/restaurant that was a similar place back on Roman times.
    - crooked-v 8y ago
      Not only did fast food exist in ancient times, so did takeout windows for faster food distribution. https://www.history.com/news/ancient-fast-food-window-discovered https://www.history.com/news/ancient-fast-food-window-discov...
    - posterboy 8y ago
      Not to mention the networks of towers transmitting the latest gossip by electro magnetic radiation (ie. light) or sound. Or the tourist agencies offering voyages to festivals. Or the high speed train network ... wait a second, that doesn't sound right.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  In fairness: survivorship bias.
vxNsr 8y ago
The auto points calculation is another thing that seems kinda incredible no matter what implementation they used.
dxbydt 8y ago
> 19th and 20th century engineering is amazing. Today, if I can't conceive of writing it as a mobile app than I just shrug. Skills thrive only if there is an incentive, monetary or otherwise, to practice them. Otherwise they atrophy. In my past 6 years in Silicon Valley, I worked mostly alongside PhDs in physics, math, comp sci, EE, quantum physics even. This is a metric TON of talent. Do you know what you can do with that kind of talent? You can like literally get a man to moon etc. Every one of these guys ( sadly including myself ) was working on some throwaway nonsense- ETL jobs, frontend js, distributed backend code that got rm -rfed and rewritten periodically, messaging systems replaced every year with messaging systems in latest language fad, all kinds of ultimate software crap manned by the jira monster with never ending tickets & feature requests. So I just saved up the breadcrumbs & headed back to academia when I couldn’t take it anymore. Better to work on serious stuff, even if it were ill monetized. You only have one life.
- bonniemuffin 8y ago
  Truly, the greatest minds of our generation are hard at work coming up with new ways to trick people into clicking ads.
  - laythea 8y ago
    This is sad, but very true. AI is driven by this now.
  - HankB99 8y ago
    Or developing trading algorithms. AKA Financial Engineering.
- cm2012 8y ago
  Getting man to the moon was more of a vanity project than at least half of all start-ups.
  - mseebach 8y ago
    Never mind the enormous amounts of throwaway work that had no direct practical applications outside that single vanity project.
mseebach 8y ago
It's easy to be nostalgic for past grandeur, but remember that the vast majority of 19th and 20th century engineers spend all their time working on mediocre solutions to uninteresting problems, and being complacent about, then getting throughly bamboozled by Japan in the 80s. I can't remember where it's from, but there's a story about a firm procuring a shipment of widgets from a factory in Japan, with 5% defect rate. They received the shipment with a separate box with the 5% defect widgets and a confused letter of apology. That was also 20th century engineering. There is amazing stuff going on, and there is a lot of bland, forgettable stuff going on, and that's the way it's always been.

wlesieutre 8y ago

I have a feeling that a lot of people today, confronted with the problem of designing a bowling alley, would go straight for a video camera, a robotic arm to pick up the pins and put them back in their spots, and machine learning to glue it together. I wonder how the cost, reliability, and speed of that would compare to the mechanical solutions. There are a couple bowling alley rerack machine horror stories somewhere on r/talesfromtechsupport.

cirgue 8y ago
Today, the focus seems to be on making sure that a product/system is easy to modify, integrate, or tear down completely instead of saying 'we need to build a system that can do x and only ever x really fast and cheap for a long time". We don't build three-decade systems in the tech industry, we build six-month systems.
- balabaster 8y ago
  What's crazy about that is that some of those 6 month systems, which were designed at the time to be a throwaway, just to get by, are still in production 26 years later and causing all kinds of problems.
- mseebach 8y ago
  That's because we predominantly build software, which has the distinct benefit that it can be changed. If ten-pin bowling goes out of fashion in favour of eleven-pin bowling, your three-decade system goes in the landfill. Your six-month gets an OTA update.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
trhway 8y ago
>I have a feeling that a lot of people today, confronted with the problem of designing a bowling alley, would go straight for a video camera, a robotic arm to pick up the pins and put them back in their spots, and machine learning to glue it together. plus stuffing the pins with IoT sensors and WiFi chips, i.e. making "smart pins", "smart ball", ... I wonder what stuff what is being done today (both kinds - known to public as well as classified) would look amazing in 2060.
- fiveoak 8y ago
  I never thought I'd have to worry about bowling alley equipment DDoSing my servers, or having them mine monero
  - vertexFarm 8y ago
    The IoTIMCC: Internet of Things Illegitimately mining crypto currency

wil421 8y ago

Why stop at 19th and 20th centuries? I had the opportunity to go to Rome and seeing what the Romans created ~2000 years ago was astounding.

auxbuss 8y ago
Being in the UK, I can hop down the road and see what the Roman's were up to; as you say, astounding, and over such a wide geography. Then again, 4,500 years ago in Egypt they built some majestic structures.
- wil421 8y ago
  Agreed. The things that fascinate me the most are how simalar we were to the Romans, or Greeks for that matter. Roads, society, government, and water utilities. Even just stitting in a bar/restaurant that was a similar place back on Roman times.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    Not only did fast food exist in ancient times, so did takeout windows for faster food distribution. https://www.history.com/news/ancient-fast-food-window-discovered https://www.history.com/news/ancient-fast-food-window-discov...
  - posterboy 8y ago
    Not to mention the networks of towers transmitting the latest gossip by electro magnetic radiation (ie. light) or sound. Or the tourist agencies offering voyages to festivals. Or the high speed train network ... wait a second, that doesn't sound right.
yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
In fairness: survivorship bias.

vxNsr 8y ago

The auto points calculation is another thing that seems kinda incredible no matter what implementation they used.

dxbydt 8y ago

> 19th and 20th century engineering is amazing. Today, if I can't conceive of writing it as a mobile app than I just shrug. Skills thrive only if there is an incentive, monetary or otherwise, to practice them. Otherwise they atrophy. In my past 6 years in Silicon Valley, I worked mostly alongside PhDs in physics, math, comp sci, EE, quantum physics even. This is a metric TON of talent. Do you know what you can do with that kind of talent? You can like literally get a man to moon etc. Every one of these guys ( sadly including myself ) was working on some throwaway nonsense- ETL jobs, frontend js, distributed backend code that got rm -rfed and rewritten periodically, messaging systems replaced every year with messaging systems in latest language fad, all kinds of ultimate software crap manned by the jira monster with never ending tickets & feature requests. So I just saved up the breadcrumbs & headed back to academia when I couldn’t take it anymore. Better to work on serious stuff, even if it were ill monetized. You only have one life.

bonniemuffin 8y ago
Truly, the greatest minds of our generation are hard at work coming up with new ways to trick people into clicking ads.
- laythea 8y ago
  This is sad, but very true. AI is driven by this now.
- HankB99 8y ago
  Or developing trading algorithms. AKA Financial Engineering.
cm2012 8y ago
Getting man to the moon was more of a vanity project than at least half of all start-ups.
- mseebach 8y ago
  Never mind the enormous amounts of throwaway work that had no direct practical applications outside that single vanity project.

mseebach 8y ago

It's easy to be nostalgic for past grandeur, but remember that the vast majority of 19th and 20th century engineers spend all their time working on mediocre solutions to uninteresting problems, and being complacent about, then getting throughly bamboozled by Japan in the 80s. I can't remember where it's from, but there's a story about a firm procuring a shipment of widgets from a factory in Japan, with 5% defect rate. They received the shipment with a separate box with the 5% defect widgets and a confused letter of apology. That was also 20th century engineering. There is amazing stuff going on, and there is a lot of bland, forgettable stuff going on, and that's the way it's always been.