Quote:
Originally Posted by Assassin
Not at all. Think back thirty years. Tube TVs, minimal electronics in autos, personal computers just getting started, (my first PC had a 750 meg hard drive, how much memory does your cell phone have today?, radar and sonar were playthings compared to what is used by the military today just in the guidance systems. The original cell phones we had at work were carried in a small overnight bag. It's startling to think where technology will be in another twenty years.
Yes technology was there but in its infancy compared to today.
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OK, so you were not joking, but you are not even close to being correct. b0ned0me provided a rebuttal already, but ...
You seem to tie the commercial availability of electronic devices to the existence of the electronics field, so let's start with that. Thirty years ago, the telephone, an electronic device had been in commercial use for over 100 years and voice radio for over 70 years. Both devices were developed far more between their inception and 30 years ago than between 30 years ago and today. AM had been improved with Single Side Band for over 60 years and SSB with suppressed carrier for decades. FM was well over 40 years old 30 years ago and commercial FM stations and receivers had been ubiquitous for over 10 years. Spread spectrum and frequency hopping were already in use by the military. Radio receivers had long since gone from crystal detectors, to vacuum tubes to transistors. Telephone switching had gone from manual to rotary dial to touch tone. Not only had home microwave ovens been around for over 20 years, but it had already been well over 10 years since people could buy a kit and build their own. All these devices did not spring into existence by someone just building a factory to turn them out, they needed to be designed by practitioners in an already well developed electronics field. Maxwell's work on electromagnetics was already over 100 years old 30 years ago.
Tube TVs had almost disappeared by 30 years ago. It is true that the CRT was still the dominant television display 30 years ago and quite a few years after that, but the rest of the electronics had been first transistorized, then most of the transistors were built into integrated circuits. Flat panel displays already existed 30 years ago, but CRTs still had massive cost and performance advantages because of all the development by the already thriving electronics field. You might as well claim that the computer field barely exists today because we still have rotating magnetic platters for storage. Two large companies that built electronics devices exclusively for use in designing, building, and testing electronics devices, Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix had been around for decades (1939 and 1946). Those devices, such as multimeters, oscilloscopes, and signal generators had already been around for over 80 years 30 years ago.
Not only had transistors long gone from invention to commercial use, to integrated circuits and integration from small scale to medium scale to large scale, but it was decided pointless to keep assigning new names for the ever increasing scale.
Electronic warfare had long had measures, counter measures, counter counter measures, etc.
I could go on and on, but I hope that you can see my point.