Advancements in technologies made obsolete before they were perfected IOTL

[IanBertram]

Tbf the BBC Micro has ended up being arguably more influential than the PC.

Only in the UK, given its key role in school IT teaching. (I sold mine to the local secondary school. I still have the Amiga which replaced it) Even then, not in terms of the technology employed.

I don't know if it's changed, but after the demise of the BBC micro, school IT lessons seemed to be limited to teaching how to use MS Office. Has the advent of the Raspberry Pi changed things?

 

[Guernsey Donkey]

Only in the UK, given its key role in school IT teaching. (I sold mine to the local secondary school. I still have the Amiga which replaced it) Even then, not in terms of the technology employed.

ARM

 

[IanBertram]

ARM

Of course - I was thinking of an alt-PC not the company which designed it.

 

[Thande]

Of course - I was thinking of an alt-PC not the company which designed it.

I think GD's point is that as the ARM RISC architecture from the BBC Micro is at the heart of pretty much all modern smartphones and tablets, and those have displaced traditional PCs among many people, maybe the BBC Micro had the last laugh after all.

 

[ForceA1]

As the thread's been revived I feel like I can reply to this. Small hydrosails, dinghy size, could indeed come along at any time, and "somewhere in Polynesia" is a good guess for where because they built light and pretty strong. Building a big one, you're going to run into materials problems pretty fast; the strain on your foils trying to get something of 100 tons (low end of ocean-going size) up on the plane is going to be brutal even assuming you figure out a rig for one - I guess something not a million miles from Bermuda rig but that doesn't scale brilliantly, and you're going to have to be able to seriously throw it around if you want to go upwind!

Hydrofoils are very weight and weight distribution sensitive, so I seriously doubt they'd be useful either for freight or as warships, they might be viable as mail packets.

Then again modern hydrofoils have retracting foils to minimise draft, and so the number of harbours useable by a hypothetical sailing hydrofoils might be very limited.

 

[The Questing Vole]

Hydrofoils are very weight and weight distribution sensitive, so I seriously doubt they'd be useful either for freight or as warships, they might be viable as mail packets.

Biggish Polynesian voyaging canoe as a mail packet is about the only conceivable use case I can think of and even then you're going to need some fairly serious innovation to get it stiff enough to be wide enough to be stable enough under sail to get up on the foils without wiggling itself apart.

 

[IanBertram]

I think GD's point is that as the ARM RISC architecture from the BBC Micro is at the heart of pretty much all modern smartphones and tablets, and those have displaced traditional PCs among many people, maybe the BBC Micro had the last laugh after all.

I think you are right. As I said, my original post was about alternatives to the PC as a piece of hardware, which back then ran some variety of DOS, where the BBC and the Amiga were streets ahead. Early versions of Windows were really just a fancy front end for MS-DOS, and it took three versions to get it useable, even so. I have actually used a PC running Windows 2 - with a tiny CRT monitor.

The smartphone as we know it is actually a fusion of multiple strands, some higher tech than others - it is effectively a pocket PC, it incorporates the facilities of PDAs like the Psion Organiser and for many, it replaces the paper notebook. It would be interesting to speculate on which companies would be at the top if desk top PCs had come from the same origins. It's unlikely, though, given the power of the IBM name at the time. I think the phrase in use then was, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM."

 

[RyanF]

Many of us will already be aware of the Ford Flivver and Volksflugzeug, attempts by Ford and the Nazis to create a small, mass-produced aircraft for private use.

What I was not aware of until this week was that there were later efforts to retrofit existing aircraft for personal recreational use, that seem drawn from the same spirit if not scope of the earlier aircraft concepts.

First in the 1950s came the Landseaire, based on surplus PBY Catalinas left over from the War, it has the feel of a small yet luxurious private yacht.

Later in the 1970s there was the Heli-Home from Winnebago. Yes, that Winnebago which probably gives an idea as to its marketed use. This too was based on surplus military aircraft, in this case Sikorsky H-19 helicopters, and came in two sizes with all you'd expect in an RV.

Not picturing the skies littered with either as probable, though that's certainly more plausible than the "Model T of the Air" that Henry Ford thought the Flivver would become, but the reason I like finding out about things like this is the colour they add to an ATL. Picture the scene on someone's yacht that then takes the skies; or someone going on the run in a helicopter RV.

 

[Lemon flavoured]

Helicopter RVs are a kind of cool idea, until you remember how unsafe helicopters are.