Three interesting examples of IT solutions from Three Different Decades (Week 1)

Digital wristwatches (1970s)

Nowadays, we can't imagine our life without displays and digital timekeeping. Today digital watch is more like a personal computer, than just a simple device to count time. However, digital watches started out their way far from binary computing and batteries. And even long before texting, alarms, etc in wristwatches. Indeed, the first appearance of the digital display comes from the early 1800s. Though the trend and the hype of digital displays didn't truly stick until 1970s, with the advancement of electronic movements. 


First "proto-digital watches"watches were mechanical and timed the reveal of new digits minute-by-minute without the use of hands. This hands-free approach was an enormous advancement in the market. By 1881 this technology experienced huge popularity in the United States and abroad. Unfortunately, these "proto-digital watches" could not keep up with the movement of traditional watch works. The problem of these watches was in the construction. Because of heavy discs carrying the digits, the movements on the Pallweber digital watches required more friction. Because of this issue, their winds couldn’t make it through 24 hours without being wounded again. So, unfortunately, despite the initial popularity of these proto-digital watches companies backed away from digital timekeeping. However, this was not the end of era for mechanical digital timekeeping.


In 1972 Hamilton released their revolutionary “Pulsar” design. These watches were sold at a surprising $2,100 (equivalent to about $12,000 today). By the end of the 70s electronic digital watches were selling for 10 dollars each, which was an affordable way to keep time. From that point on innovators like Seiko and Casio began developing their own proto-smartwatches. These pieces included things like calculators, cameras, and even built-in televisions. As we can see now digital wristwatch continued its' life into the 21st century.



Photo 1: Pulsar digital wristwatch [6]



LINUX (1990s)

First of all Linux - is a computer operating system created in the early 1990's by Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds and the Free Software Faoundation (FSF). While still being a student at the University of Helsinki, a young man started developing Linux to create a system simmiular to MINIX, a UNIX operating system. In early 1990's he released his first version. Version 1.0 of the Linux kernel (the core of the operating system) was released in 1994. About the same time, American software developer Richard Stallman and the Free Software Faoundation (FSF) made a lot of effort to create an open source UNIX-like operating system that was called as GNU. The utilities that were created by these guys were later added to the Linux kernel to create a complete system called GNU/Linux, or simply Linux.


Photo 2: Linux [4]


Linux grew throughout the 1990s because of the efforts of hobbyist developers. Although Linux is not a user-friendly operating systems like Windows or Mac, it is an efficient and reliable system that rarely crashes. In addition to that, Linux is an open-source system and can be modified for different users. 



Google Nexus (2010s)

Google Nexus was a brand of Android smartphones initially released in 2010. I decided to write about this phone, because I actually possesed one of these phones and I really liked it, until a car drove on it. Unfortunately it was broken into pieces. :(

Photo 3: Nexus 4 [5]

P.S. I used a future version of Nexus: Nexus 4

Its software was developed by Google, and its hardware was manufactured by HTC, Huawei, Samsung, Motorolla and LG. Unlike most Android phones from third-party manufacturers, the Google Nexus ran a "stock" version of the operating system. Therefore these phones received software updates as soon as Google releases them and they are purely on top of the base OS. The last Nexus 6P was release in 2015. 

Nowadays the ancestors of Nexus are called as Google Pixel.


References:









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