3 ms·
My father in law was in the construction business during this time at a company building bridge spans. A supplier gave them 5 Apple IIs as a bonus for buying so
by wil421 3y ago
My father in law was in the construction business during this time at a company building bridge spans. A supplier gave them 5 Apple IIs as a bonus for buying so much product. The owner exclaimed, throw them out computers are a fad!
To calculate the bridge spans requirements it took 3 guys a 3-5 days to do the calculations, drafting the spans, and double checking everything. My father in law opened the book on basic and saw the math it could do.
He wrote a very basic program to take the inputs and do the math. It took the computer less than an hour to return the results.
Who knows that the future brings but I’ll be optimistic.
- bushbaba 3y agoYou could argue the computer was an extension of those human done reports. The iPhone moving the business reports from desk to be mobile as you go. VR on the other hand is entirely new paradigm. However VR will find its way into a lot of “pro” industries. VR interior design, VR architecture, VR manufacturing line design. There’s tons of usecases.
- losteric 3y agoI think the transitions from punch cards to CLIs, to GUI/mouse interfaces, then to touch interfaces, are more apt metaphors when considering the impact of VR. Touch found it's place as the interface for small-form devices. I'm pretty sure VR is the interface for gaming (with other niche applications). It will be wildly popular, probably a headset in every house within 20 years, I just suspect it will be doing what we already expect - gaming, visualizing chemical reactions, architecture, etc... things we already do in 2d, made just a bit more convenient in 3d with spatial controllers.
- brandall10 3y agoMy first internship was at a biology research startup back in ‘96. My supervisor, the head of R&D, had an SGI w/ 3d goggles and a glove and would spend hours in front of it manipulating virtual molecules. He would talk about his days as a PhD student at Stanford in the early 70s working with punch cards and the progress of computing up until that time just over 20 years later… and thought that maybe in 10 years, when his rig that cost about $100k would be cheap enough for the average consumer, it would be the next step in personal computing.
- detourdog 3y agowhat about the idea that the headset is just a crutch. It seems the UIs shown eye and hand tracking are only tied to the goggles as demonstration to get the tools in developers hands.