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Comment by masswerk | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I do this seldom, rather, never, but reading in the introduction, "Tech is entering its second 50 years.", I couldn't advance any further. Usurpatory taxonomy is even worse than pervasive superlatives. (Is it 160 BC? Are we going to see the Antikythera mechanism? Really?) This is very much stereotypical trend presentation wording.

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It’s very clever to say that ‘technology’ goes back to the ancient Greeks, or the invention of bronze, or maybe the first chipped piece of flint, so ‘there’s nothing new about technology’. But this is also desperately pedantic, and adds nothing at all to the conversation, when we all know perfectly well what the normal usage of the word technology is. Quibbling about terminology tells us nothing about ideas

I'd say, "tech" as in scientifically based engineering design arguably starts with Archimedes. (Mind that the Antikythera mechanism is generally thought to be an offspring of this revolution and that it is also considered by some as the first computer. The circumstances of the site, where it had been discovered, also suggest that mechanisms like this were carefully marketed goods. You might say, that by 90 BC, there had been an established tech business.) However, if you prefer to dismiss this as a lost tradition, then you might consider that there was certainly tech and a thriving tech business in the Victorian age. Even, if you wanted to dismiss any pre-electronics, I have a hard time figuring out what would mark 1971 as a starting point for current developments. (E.g., mind that Moores law was proposed in 1965 or that Kay's KiddiComp/Dynabook concept, which started the handheld revolution, was envisioned in 1968.) The idea that "tech" or technology started in 1971 is highly absurd.

Edit: Please compare a recent entry on the front page, which supported the idea that there hasn't been a key innovation since 1978. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947901

> when we all know perfectly well what the normal usage of the word technology is

yes, exactly: technology goes back to the ancient Greeks, or the invention of bronze, or maybe the first chipped piece of flint.

Would you have kept reading if it said "Information technology is entering its second 50 years"?

But if he admitted τέχνη goes back more than 50 years then Ben would need to engage some actual STS instead of just projecting current investment trends! He might even need enough object permanence to understand things existed before he was born!

Pretty sure Ben read history at Cambridge and is aware of the past.

I even have some difficulties figuring out what might distinguish 1971 as a landmark. In computing, it was a mildly impressive year seeing the introduction of coin-op video games (Computer Space), the general availability of floppy disks (while 1960s tech), Niklaus Wirth gave us Pascal as the latest in Algol-like languages, but not really that much out of the ordinary. (Well, the intel 4004 was introduced, starting the age of cost-effective Japanese calculators. But the 8008 was sketched out before that, relying on the late 1960s design of the DP 2200 – and it would take a few years before anyone took serious interest in that one.)

Well as we all know, all of computing revolves around Unix, and therefore effectively begins at 1970-01-01. I'm... mostly joking, although that's actually basically true for the parts of computing that I personally work in so I actually do use 1970 as the beginning mark for the "modern era" in my head.

I forgot about this one! As to my defence, my first computers didn't sport a date (only TI and TI$) and then came classic Macs, which used the more Edwardian January 1, 1904 as the epoch. ;-)

I have never ever been impressed by the author of this piece. Faulty reasoning by mushy historical analogy in the extreme.

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