by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright March 2019
One place where nanotech has been making a big difference over the decades is in computing power. This is a review of how computing power has changed since the end of World War Two in 1945 and how nanotech has been assisting this change since Gordon Moore of Intel came up with Moore's Law in 1965.
One of the first projects that automated calculating (computing) was applied to was collating trajectory tables for artillery shells. This is like doing business accounting but even more tedious. In business accounting there are routine monthly changes and surprise changes as a business changes in nature from year to year. In artillery tables there is lots of calculating to do with changes only in the beginning variables -- what kind of shell is being fired -- never in the calculating done on those variables.
During World War II this was women's work. As the war ended the people at IBM noticed that this was a lot like making phone connections so they adapted phone relay equipment to this task, thereby relieving a lot of women from a seriously tedious task. Mechanical relays replaced women, and a few years later vacuum tubes replaced mechanical relays -- they were faster and cheaper, and, it turned out, more versatile. This switching to a faster, cheaper and more versatile technology happened again when solid-state transistors got into the act.
If a technology is to become a world-shaking one, it moves from being first used for small and obscure tasks to much bigger and better known tasks. As this happens on-lookers come to say, "You can do that with it, too? Neat!" This additional use is the "surprise use" that sets the technology on the road to becoming world-shaking.
As computing equipment got faster, cheaper and smaller, the tasks it could take on became more versatile. The surprise use for transistor-based computers was business accounting. These were the "minicomputers" that shook up the business world in the 1950's. One of the surprise effects of minicomputers was making "conglomerate" businesses viable: access to much better accounting systems was that important. Further proof of this was that as computer-based accounting became pervasive and available to all, conglomerates lost their sheen as a hot business choice -- they became corporate dinosaurs instead.
In the mid-sixties the evolution to faster, smaller and cheaper took another dramatic step: integrated circuits (IC's) became the core computing technology instead of discrete transistors. Integrated circuits basically take lots of transistors and put them together on a single surface. This process allows the transistors to become much smaller and much more densely packed together. Gordon Moore was one of the pioneers and one of the founders of Intel a pioneering IC company. He also came up with the now-famous "Moore's Law" which forecast that IC technology would steadily shrink in size and cost at a rate of halving every two years. This trend has proved remarkably enduring.
The surprise uses coming from this steady evolution in computing power have also been steady and dramatic. Personal computers came out in the 1970's, and now in the 2010's we have smartphones, and there have been lots of surprises in between these.
We may be near the end of the Moore's Law era in IC technology. If we are then the Law of Diminishing Returns will kick in and nanotechnology will no longer provide a steady stream of faster, cheaper and smaller IC's. If that happens then the steady stream of world-shaking surprise uses will also diminish. The surprises will move on to some other technology that is just getting into its Moore's Law era. One possibility where this might happen is genetic engineering using CRISPR genetic editing. The Moore's Law aspect of this is better understanding of what to edit and declining costs of doing the editing. These could combine to produce a "personal computer" era in gene editing where it becomes a widespread hobby.
In sum, the world is not about to run out of technology-related surprises, but nanotechnology-related computing may be nearing the end of its being-surprising era.
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