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  3. 46. The onrush of cheap communications, powerful computers and the Internet

46. The onrush of cheap communications, powerful computers and the Internet

游客2025-04-16  46
问题     46. The onrush of cheap communications, powerful computers and the Internet all explain why many people feel that, nowadays, change is happening ever more rapidly as technological progress accelerates. Moore’s law, that the power of microchips doubles every 18 months, has been tested and found correct. This is what gives people the sense of a world shifting beneath their feet.
    47. Yet the implication that rapid change is a new phenomenon is again misleading. If you measure the time it takes for a technology to become widely diffused, today’s experience does not seem unusual. Take the car. The basic patent for an internal combustion engine capable of powering a car was filed in 1877. By the late 1920s-50 years later-over half of all American households owned a car.
    48. The comparable dates for the computer are harder to tie down, but the first big computer, based on vacuum valves, was built in1946. The transistor-the first semiconductor device-was invented at Bell Laboratories in 1948. The first patent for an integrated circuit was filed in 1959. Now, in 1999-50 years after the first one was built-around half of American households own a computer. The pace of introduction has been similar to that of the car.
    49. You have to cheat, choosing only the date for the personal computer, say (mid1970s), or the Internet (ditto) to make it seem much more rapid.
    Comparing its diffusion among private users is, you might say, unfair to the computer, for that machine’s main use is in businesses. On that measure, the best historical analogy is with electrification, and the spread of the electric dynamo into factories.
    50. According to Paul David, a historian at Stanford University in California, the first electricity-generating stations had been installed in New York and London in 1881, but it was well into the 1920s before the dynamo became widely used and started to raise productivity. The adoption of the computer in business has also been slow, and failed to have any measurable impact on productivity until very recently. [br]
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答案 不过把这种快速变化看作新现象是不对的。如若你算一下一项技术从它产生到被广泛应用所需要的时间，那么你就不会对今天所发生的这些变化觉得奇怪了。
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