Aug 1, 2011

What are the most important inventions or discoveries made during your lifetime?
Wow there are so many that it is hard to say what was most important. I have talked about the space program which I believe was one of the most significant so I will have to mention the age of home computers and associated inventions which include cell phones to ipads. The home computer was a thing we only joked about when I worked at Signetics where we made parts for the space program and car radios plus a host of other things using Integrated Circuit technology. We had the first little versions of the home computer at work when someone would bring their latest purchase in for everyone to see. The TRS 80 was one of the first versions and I even owned an Instructor 50. It was the Signetics version of a home computer. Since then I have had an Apple computer, now called MACs. And have had various versions of the IBM home computers. When I was in college at Snow we had a field trip to University of Utah where we toured their computer which took up an entire floor of one of the buildings on campus. A short few years later there were handheld calculators that could do more calculations in a few seconds that the computer at the U of U could not do. Now home computers are way past those capabilities and are now just a necessary household appliance like the stove and fridge. Cell phones are nearly to the stage of being capable of doing more than even Dick Tracy’s watch, a comic strip from the 50’s and 60’s where the lead detective had a watch that would do what we do on a cell phone but also had video conferencing. In many ways we are even past that except for the video conferencing watch which I a sure will come along as the need for it dictates to the money hungry technology companies.