4 ms·

Intuitive?

• derefr 6y ago
  That's very close! But something that's intuitive in hindsight might still have required some hard work in development, rather than "just" a brilliant, novel idea. Photolithography, for example, is intuitive, and far simpler as a technique for constructing circuit boards than what came before it; but etching circuits using light projected onto light-activated chemicals isn't one of these "the world was ready for it, someone just needed to do it" ideas. Someone thought of it, then needed to do a whole lot of work to get it to happen, finding the right chemicals, experimenting with projection technologies, etc. After the fact, the idea of photolithography is extremely intuitive; but it wasn't a better-term-for-"obvious in retrospect" idea.