
Concorde moment - ingve
https://appliedabstractions.com/2017/11/26/concorde-moment/
======
jakobegger
The decline of HyperCard was a Concorde moment for me.

HyperCard was a brilliant tool that allowed anybody to produce interactive
software. It had a pretty simple model (stacks of cards) and could be used to
build databases, presentations, or games. It was never updated with proper
color support, so people lost interest.

Nothing ever came close to the simplicity and power of Hypercard.

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raldi
A lot of these moments come from changing norms regarding risk-aversion and
willingness to be inconvenienced.

For example, the airport-security experience reached its peak in August 2001
and will never be that good again. The Empire State Building was built in less
than 14 months using 1930s technology, but only because of safety standards
much more lax than we'd allow today (five construction workers died). In fact,
a lot of great buildings could never be built today simply because of zoning
restrictions about height and boxiness.

Another example is the NY subway system. Construction of the original line
began in 1900 and was complete in 1904. A century later, it's taking about ten
times as long to build the Second Avenue Subway. But a big part of that is
that we used to just rip up the ground and inconvenience everyone nearby with
yearlong street closures and dynamite vibrations. That doesn't fly anymore.

~~~
mikeash
Surely airport security was at its peak before the 70s when they started
actually screening things? Before that you just got on the plane.

On the topic of subways, I'm always fascinated by the example of Beijing's
line 2. It was planned as a circular route approximately following the old
city wall. They couldn't afford to bore the tunnel, and had to use cut-and-
cover instead. This consists of digging a trench to the desired depth, then
covering the top. Of course, this requires destroying whatever is on the
surface there. This would have destroyed a lot of people's homes. But a
solution was found: rather than _approximately_ following the old city wall,
how about _exactly_ following the old city wall, and destroying that instead
of people's houses? Nobody lives in it, after all. And thus Beijing's line 2
was born, and the centuries-old historic city wall is no more, aside from a
few preserved gatehouses.

Imagine trying something like _that_ in a place like New York City.

~~~
mikestew
_Surely airport security was at its peak before the 70s when they started
actually screening things? Before that you just got on the plane._

Until 2001, you essentially just got on the plane. Oh, they made you walk
through a metal detector, so take your keys out of your pocket. Other than
that, walk right to the gate whether you hold a ticket or not. Don’t tell my
wife this, but one of the pluses of increased security is I just dump her at
the door now instead of parking he car and navigating the airport concourse
just so I can give her a kiss seconds before she walks on the plane. And I
don’t have to be waiting at the gate when she comes home. (I know, real
sentimental guy I am. She’s fine with it, which is what matters.) OTOH, we did
lose the ability to just go to the airport and watch planes take off. Yup,
just drive to your local international airport, with no ticket and no money
spent otherwise, go through the metal detector, pick a random terminal and
watch them come and go. Leave your I. D. at home, no one will want to look at
it.

I remember having the spouse come to a screeching stop in front of the airport
20 minutes before my flight, carry-on in hand, doing “an O. J.” (re: old
commercial w/O. J. running through an airport to catch a plane). Made it, too.

They’d scan checked bags and carry-ones, but that was on a separate thread, so
one didn’t notice most of the time.

In summary, yeah, it was slightly better before the hijackings of the 70s, but
not by much IMO.

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raldi
In 2002, when I got a call on my landline, the Caller ID would show the
caller's name (either an individual's name, or their business) _without my
having to maintain any sort of contact list_. The phone company would transmit
this information to my phone's screen, populated from their own database.

I can't understand why an iPhone in 2017 lacks this feature.

~~~
bluedino
Has nothing to do with the phone. The cell providers don't have, or send the
information with the call like your landline phone company does.

~~~
ThePadawan
I also believe that this feature has been somewhat deprecated since there is
no authentication involved in caller ID at all.

That resulted in cold callers camouflaging themselves using either suppressed
or incorrect phone numbers, reducing the value of called ID to zero.

It's equivalent to someone shouting through your door "Open up, this is the
police". You would not do that without a chain or peephole, either.

~~~
raldi
The value wasn’t zero; even with spoofing, there’s a big difference between
“this unknown caller is camouflaging their name to something I don’t
recognize” vs “Oh, it’s the dry cleaners; I’d better pick up.”

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Jdam
VoIP is my Concord moment. The telco provider forced virtually all customers
to do their phone calls through VoIP, instead of the ordinary old phone
network. Every other week my router sends me an E-Mail about a call that
failed, service unavailabilities and so on. There were even widespread outages
that affected whole states. In terms of the plain old phone lines, I cannot
think of a single outage in the past 20 years. It even worked when power
supply itself failed.

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tomohawk
The Concorde was a project that could have only happened due to the lavish
government spending by Britain and France, as well as the tying in of national
pride. It made no economic sense at all, and they hardly made any of them.

The 20707 Boeing effort was more practical, but had the same genesis as the
Concorde. It was also canned once the US pulled the funding and the oil shocks
showed it would likely never be profitable. At least they stopped throwing
good money after bad.

The 747 was considerably more practical, and completely demolished the
competition for years. It was the result of Pan Am (which owned the
international flight scene at the time) coming to Boeing with real
requirements, instead of just national pride, for a much larger jet. Boeing
also decided to make it possible for it to be a freighter as well.

The 747 was the truly revolutionary plane.

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lisper
If the FCC ends net neutrality, that will be a Concorde moment for the
internet.

~~~
phinnaeus
Perhaps not, as the motivations behind it are fairly obvious (profit at the
expense of all else).

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michaelfeathers
This was a Concorde moment for software: the move away from 'The Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs' at MIT.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167453](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167453)

------
pesenti
Concord moments are just parenthesis in the history of humanity. 5 years ago
the electric car would have been on that list. Faster than sound planes will
come back, it's just a matter of time and technology being mature enough for
the product to be economically viable.

~~~
raldi
_> 5 years ago the electric car would have been on that list._

I don't understand -- are you saying that at some point prior to 2012,
electric cars had been in frequent use, and then that stopped at some point?

~~~
chkuendig
Yes, this was a widespread believe, e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1)

~~~
raldi
The EV1 was never in widespread use.

~~~
dmurray
There were a lot more EV1s than Concordes, which is surely the relevant
comparison here.

~~~
raldi
That’s ridiculous. Each Concorde was shared by something like 50,000 people
per year. Each EV1 was shared by... I’ll be generous here: 50?

~~~
philsnow
"5" would be generous, >90% of miles driven in America have only the driver
and no passengers.

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blhack
Concorde moments for tech:

-When RIM stopped making the blackberry 7520, which (paired with nextel, with push-to-talk) was the best phone, with the best UI, ever made. They made the phones thinner, and shinier...and less useful in the process.

-Dropping 3.5mm headphone jacks, an example of a standard that works, and has worked, flawlessly, for a very long time (I know this horse is beaten to death).

-Getting rid of iPods for "iPod touch" (neutered iPhones)

~~~
raldi
Why _don 't_ we have push-to-talk on every Android and iPhone in 2017?

~~~
blhack
Because it was all replaced with a software implementation of it that wasn't
as good, which soured people against the idea.

~~~
raldi
What are you referring to?

~~~
csours
Push to talk by Nextel had it's own allocated bandwidth. Bandwidth = MONEY, so
they shut down PTT and sold the bandwidth.

In the manufacturing plant where I worked, we went from being almost able to
understand people on Nextel PTT to completely unable to understand people with
the software implementation. The plant has since switched to local walkie
talkies with repeaters - with Nextel you could easily start chatting with
anyone else on the network, pretty much anywhere.

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tomphoolery
It's strange how this article was written as if the author doesn't realize
that there are more things than just power/speed dictating what it means for a
technology to be successful. Technology like the Concorde or Bugatti Veyron
wasn't taken away from us, it was just rendered obsolete.

What killed the Concorde? Broadband Internet. Who needs to fly to Europe all
the time if you can just video chat? The Concorde is noisy, uncomfortable, and
highly polluting. If one could make a better version of the Concorde I'm sure
people would be into it...but really the "big win" of using this jet was that
you got somewhere a couple hours faster, and it cost 3x the normal price of an
airline. What normal person would really be doing this?

What killed the Bugatti Veyron? I guess this one is a general sense of
"YAGNI", because seriously who gives a shit. The car doesn't look all that
nice, who cares if it can go real fast. Fast engines are not what makes good
cars, there are lots of other factors involved.

~~~
mikeash
I’d argue that the 70s oil crises killed Concorde. It was basically DOA. It
limped along for decades having built only 12 airplanes and serving only two
routes in the long term. It never really made money, roughly breaking even
operationally but not paying back its R&D. It was ultimately a prestige
project. It got that job done pretty well, but it was never successful in a
way that would persist.

The Veyron is an even more extreme example of that. It was intended to be a
prestige product from the start. It wasn’t supposed to make money and it only
gets produced until the company comes up with a different way to spend that
marketing or research budget.

Edit: the Veyron is a particularly terrible example here because it was
discontinued in favor of a new model that's even more insane. The Veyron was
succeeded by the Chiron, which has an anticipated top speed of 288MPH,
although it's currently electronically limited to "only" 261MPH. I don't see
any way in which the Chiron is substantially inferior, so I don't see how it
could possibly be an example of a major technological advance fading away.

~~~
cstross
Hark back to 1973 when Concorde production began and they had around 120
advance orders/options. Most of which evaporated because of not only the oil
shock but, significantly, the discovery that the Boeing 747 (and other wide-
bodies) could make huge amounts of revenue by carrying more passengers,
cheaper. The 747 was originally expected to be a cargo freighter, once SSTs
like Concorde ate the passenger market in the 80s, hence the high cockpit
positioned over the nose door on the cargo variants.

Concorde was the last gasp of the idea that air travel was a very expensive
form of transport for the elite, who would pay to save time over taking an
ocean liner. Instead we got the democratization of air travel. It's no
accident that the cruise liner died out as a normal form of international
transport (as opposed to a recreational vehicle) at the same time that wide-
body airliners caught on.

(Side-note: the plans for Concorde B are worth googling — an incremental
upgrade with quieter engines and a range that could have stretched to 5000
miles, opening up a bunch more routes, and due to enter production by 1982.)

Graffiti: I used it and I don't miss it! While early on-screen multitouch
keyboards sucked, what _really_ makes Graffiti show its age is modern gesture-
based systems like Swype or SwiftKey, where each word is a unique ideogram
composed by dragging a finger across a QWERTY map in letter order. Graffiti
typically took 2-3 gestures to enter a letter: with Swype I'm typically on 5-7
gestures per _word_ , which overall is much faster (average word length in
English is 5.5 letters). Graffiti has in fact been ported to iOS and Android
... but relatively few people use it because times have moved on.

~~~
notahacker
Yeah, ultimately the Concorde failed because it was worst-in-class for the
stuff that turned out to actually matter (cost per revenue passenger km,
noise, range)

The "spruce goose" still holds the record for biggest wingspan of any aircraft
and largest ever flying boat, and the Hindenberg class airships for largest
ever aircraft (and probably least flight-like experience), and ultimately
Concorde's speed turned out to be no more relevant to its commercial
viability...

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tbrock
If it weren’t for the iPod, Apple Computer would be on that list.

RethinkDB comes to mind.

In the vein of palm pilot: The Apple Knewton.

~~~
lisper
OS X Snow Leopard. That was the last time a computer operating system Just
Worked.

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TrisMcC
From my small sphere of existence:

Gnome 1 -> Gnome 2. Some people just wanted Gnome 1 with antialiased fonts

Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3. Just when Gnome 2 got as useful as Gnome 1, bubye Gnome 2.

NNTP -> expertsexchange/slashdot

Eudora -> yahoo mail

Not all of these were permanent.

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nawitus
The Bugatti Veyron shouldn't qualify as a Concorde moment, because there is a
successor called the Bugatti Chiron.

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michaelfeathers
Isn't it strange that the concorde moment for aviation was the retirement of
the SR-71?

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amelius
> In the end, it turned out to be too noisy, too polluting, and too expensive,
> never really making money.

Thus I think "Concorde moment" is really misnomer. A technological solution is
always a balance, and if your balance tips the wrong way, your solution sucks.
That's the hard reality of what engineers have to deal with.

~~~
vzcx
Indeed, and I would frame this story as more the construction and operation of
the Concorde was more ahead of it's time than it's grounding a step backwards.

The way I see it: there is simply not enough wealth accumulated to keep these
flights running. Perhaps in a future world were aviation kerosene is cheaper,
engines more efficient, and airframe and power plant maintenance more heavily
automated, we'll see a revival of supersonic transportation. Until then, I'd
rather airlines not bleed money keeping these planes flying. One might get
teary-eye'd over the shuttering of the program, but more efficient allocation
of resources is a real cause for celebration!

The notion of "'progress' at all costs" is an insane one.

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regularfry
The Thinkpad T420. Last model with _that_ keyboard.

~~~
noir_lord
Not convinced by that, I was a massive fan of that era's keyboard but having
recently come back to the fold with a T470P (having use Dell's for most of a
decade) I love it's keyboard as well (even the smaller function keys simply
aren't an issue once I adapted to them).

I still have an old R series with the old style keyboard kicking around and I
tried them side by side, it was (and is) a great keyboard but it's simply not
better than the keyboard on the T470P in any way I actually care about.

