To Conserve Knowledge

To Conserve Knowledge

People in the high-tech industries don't like to demonstrate knowledge of older technology. In some circles of the computer field such knowledge actually carries a stigma!
There are valid arguments for using NEW technology whenever possible. Older technology at whatever level is a mixture of elegance and crudeness, with old questions answered and new questions left unanswered, problems left unsolved. Most young people (and a lot of old people, too) tend to take this view, and lace it with scorn for the old.
As a result, some people will avoid mention of older stuff except in a disparaging sentence.
I did what I could using limited resources. Japanese in past generations built thin paper houses to stretch their extremely limited natural resources. When I see people with what I call "Starship" computers with tremendous resources -- superfast processors, huge RAM, superhuge capacity hard drives, advanced and versatile programs, and wizardlike peripherals -- yet lack basic communication skills, basic historical and cultural knowledge, the essential elements of a classical education, I'm appalled.
While older technology is relatively crude, it does do the job for which it was designed. We tend to think of technological advancement as an ordinal progression, rather than an expansion in different directions. CD-R burner drives are preferred over zip disks in desktop computers as the compact disks have greater storage capacity, but that doesn't mean that zip drives are a more primitive technology. (Actually, files can be stored more quickly on a zip disk than on a CD, no special software is required to write the files, and the zip disk is in a sturdy casing that protects it from damage unlike the CD.)
Computer pioneers John Mauchley and J. Presper Eckert, inventors of the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), had plans to produce concurrent computer processors, but serial processors took off and concurrent processors fell by the wayside; that doesn't mean that concurrent processing is an old-fashioned, primitive, or inferior concept (ironically, serial or Von Neumann processor-based programs may PRETEND to be concurrent processors through use of semaphores, mutexes, critical sections, etc.).
It enables people to develop software more quickly than with previous development environments. McCoy made the connection that adrenaline shot through Chekov's system and made him resistant to radiation. Dr. Janet Wallace said that another medicine, hironaline, was used in radiation treatment instead, but "Bones" said that adrenaline was used in earlier radiation treatment research. A serum containing adrenaline was given to the surviving agers and they were restored to their proper biological ages. A recommendation was made to the Federation scientific community to include adrenaline in further studies on radiation. The point is that not all old ideas are useless, primitive, nor naïve, and not all new ideas are better.

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