About a year ago I was in class and I had to give a presentation with two other people. Our topic was about what to do after the death of Moore's Law.

Moore's Law basically states that transistors get smaller over time. We're getting close to the point where we physically cannot make then smaller. We can't throw more power at our problems anymore.

So our team found three solutions in our research, and we each presented one. One solution was using neural networks, implemented in hardware. Another was about using quantum computers.

Following the rabbithole down new exciting fields of research. That's all fine and dandy.

But... why? Why must we keep going? Are our computers and our phones and our video game consoles not enough? Must we keep pushing the envelope for the sake of pushing the envelope?

My part of the presentation was on embracing its death.

This is a Sega Mega Drive, released in 1989. Its purpose is to allow the user to play 2D video games. I would argue that it was very good at serving that role.

In Brazil, the Mega Drive was licensed and distributed by Tec-Toy. Brazil in the 90s wasn't exactly known for having great wealth, manufacturing capacity, or a developed tech sector. But Tec-Toy had the rights to the Master System and Mega Drive.

As it turns out, that was good enough until well into the 00's. A Mega Drive was an affordable video game console with some very good games for it.
The newer consoles made it down, but the MD was still there.
(*Ronaldinho Soccer 64 theme plays softly in the bg*)

Tec-Toy not only translated but even developed new games for the platform too. Here's Duke Nuekm 3D for the Mega Drive. Pales in comparison to the actual game, but it works.

There was a point to that tangent. The Mega Drive works. It plays 2D games. That's not an obsolete artform.

We've just moved on from the Mega Drive. Market demand for the system eventually cratered, and Sega stopped producing them in the US and Japan.

I'm obviously not suggesting we revive the Mega Drive. It's an old platform. We can do better now.

But there's a lot of video games that *do not need* the horsepower of a Playstation 5 or an Xbox Series X. Bu because time marches on, that's what every game is released on.

This is an HP Elitebook 8740w. It was released in 2010. It has a Intel Core i7 (the first gen), 6GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard disk, and it supports up to DirectX10.

I own one. It's my favorite laptop. It's more than enough for me.

We don't always need the latest and greatest. We need what works.

"What works" isn't sexy, though. "What works" doesn't make the magic stock line that dictates us all go up. So we keep innovating, we keep making new things, just to do what the old stuff did but different.

Let's stop beating around the bush here.

This is an Optacon. It's an electromechanical device that enables blind people to read printed material that has not been transcribed into Braille.

It was produced from 1971-2005. No replacement exists today.

In 2005, the company that made the Optacon suddenly shut down. Employees were "walked out" of the building and lost accrued vacation time, medical insurance, and all benefits. No new machines were made, and no official repairs could take place.

The Optacon was the creation of John G. Linvill, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford. He had been working on the project since 1962.

The Optacon was not a simple device. It involved tedious lab research, measurements, testing, and experimentation.

This the the "output" of the Optacon, a 24x6 matrix of tactile stimulators. They vibrate at between 200 and 300 Hz and they're spaced at 1-2mm apart. This was solely due to human limitations, not technological.

As far as I know, this is unique to the discontinued Optacon.

Telesensory, the company that was manufacturing the Optacon, had by the late 90s shifted its interests into OCR and speech synthesis solutions. It was easier to use, more popular, less expensive. The Optacon got the axe.

I guess deaf-blind people just don't get to read anymore.

It is genuinely depressing to read the Optacon mailing list, at https://www.freelists.org/archive/optacon-l/

Spare parts, if they exist, are very expensive. The actual complete units even moreso. They're passed on from person to person, like freaking Pip-Boys in Fallout.

I've looked. There are no replacements for the Optacon. The MIT Fingerreader uses OCR and TTS. Same with the OrCam MyEye 2.

Something as vital as this shouldn't be at the whim of funding dollars and private companies.

The moral here is that what's new isn't always what's best. New stuff has its place (i.e: 3D video games) but we need to focus on the potential of what already exists as well. Refine it. Increment and improve upon it. Optimize it. Cost-reduce it.

Don't kill it.

Okay, so there kinda is a replacement for the Optacon, the "VideoTIM". http://www.abtim.de/home__e_/the_videotim/the_videotim.html

So that's good at least. Except I don't know if it works better or worse, considering the page doesn't even show up on Google.

I honestly wonder how much human knowledge has been forgotten because we never look back.

Good example: the automatic Sunbeam toaster from 1946, that's better than yours.

Here's another cool one: the Skiatron, aka the Scotophor, aka the dark trace tube.

They're CRTs that make the screen *darker*. They're persistent, too. And are good in sunlight. They weren't useful for television, but they were great output devices for WWII era radar displays.

Supposedly in 1953, the Skiatron corp. made one of the first payperview systems, "Subscriber-Vision," that used IBM punch cards for billing and descrambling.

this is irrelevant but when am i ever going to get the chance to mention Skiatron again?

And honestly, that was the right market to chase. The Skiatron tube wasn't going anywhere...

In the 1970's, Tektronix made the Tektronix 4010 terminal series. It featured a hi-resolution vector display with persistent images.

One disadvantage of the 4010 was that it was basically a CRT turned into an Etch-a-Sketch. There was no partial erasure, as erasing involved turning off the "flood gun"

The Skiatron, however, did support partial erasure in theory, as it erased via infrared light or heat.

The biggest drawback of the Skiatron was that erasing took a few *seconds*... using 1940s technology. Maybe that could be improved by the 70s.

I don't know if Tektronix considered the Skiatron design. Maybe they did. But if they didn't... they missed out on a good idea.