I’m curious about this. Computers and phones used to be huge. But it seems like if you they know how to do it, they’d be able to do it smaller than they originally did it.
I mean I can understand the concept. I’m just wondering exactly what it was. It wasn’t that we found new stuff /materials. Was it that there were smarter people? Like how do we get from the first laptops that were huge to something like a MacBook air? And how did we get from 126mb ram to 16 gig, or 500mb Hdd to 1TB HDD. Even SSD have gotten bigger but in the same amount of space. I don’t understand why it could not have done these things at the beginning
In: Technology
> It wasn’t that we found new stuff /materials.
Depending on how you defined ‘stuff’: sure it was. The transistor hadn’t even been discovered until about 80 years ago by people messing around with various materials in novel combinations.
> Like how do we get from the first laptops that were huge to something like a MacBook air?
Refinements in manufacturing and design. Even a whole field of study with smart people needs time to practice things and learn from experience. Synthesizing knowledge just on pure intelligence is incredibly difficult; with very few exceptions people and even an entire discipline and its practitioners need to apply knowledge and learn from the experience.
> I don’t understand why it could not have done these things at the beginning
Some of these refinements and design improvements theoretically could have been done from the start, but many would have been basically impossible to do from the start because they relied on other improvements in other fields that hadn’t been figured out yet.
Imagine if you took a team of genius nuclear engineers back 1500: it wouldn’t matter. You’d never be able to build a usable nuclear reactor because, although the engineers would theoretically know how, you’d never be able to find good enough materials or precise enough construction equipment to build something that needs a lot of quite advanced materials and construction. No matter how much of a genius your nuclear engineers are they aren’t going to be able to get a 1500s era blacksmith to produce materials that require modern metallurgy and chemistry, and without those materials you’ll never build a usable reactor.
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