Photonics and Fibre Optics stands out as a field that "happened" in the 1980's and 90's. Erbidium doping (1986) was a massive shot in the arm for our civilisati

Photonics and Fibre Optics stands out as a field that "happened" in the 1980's and 90's. Erbidium doping (1986) was a massive shot in the arm for our civilisation, enabiling low power long distance high throughput, low latency communication. Wave Division Multiplexing (WMD) (1978) is arguably more important still - enabling massive throughput into the Tb range, and is an idea reused in many communication systems outside of fibre. WMD (and caches, but they have their limits) is why we don't have a internet capacity crunch with our backbones flooding everytime Netflix releases something. Yet no one in this thread nor the author of the article mentions the field. I think people understand how their cars work much better than they understand how the internet works.