Five Things Tech: Predictions, Batteries, Shoebox, Archie, Floppy Disc
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Hello and welcome back to Five Things Tech!
This week you can read about the difficulties of predicting tech developments, how batteries are changing the electric grid, how datacenters could be shrunk in size and power consumption, what it took to bring the first search engine of the internet back to life and why the floppy disc is still being used.
Please enjoy Five Things Tech!
What I Got Wrong in a Decade of Predicting the Future of Tech
I can so relate to this. It is extremely hard to predict the future, especially when it comes to tech. The user adoption rate is always different than one would expect. As an early adopter myself, I always assume that people will quickly realize what I realized a while ago. That almost never happened…
Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity
It’s amazing how quickly battery tech is evolving and how that is changing the electric grid. The development in the USA is encouraging and we see a huge push to solar and wind in Germany as well.
How to Put a Data Center in a Shoebox
Don’t worry, even though it says “how” in the headline, this is not really a practical step-by-step guide, but a rather an interesting discussion of an amazing concept. As the demand for data centers grows and the energy consumption rises accordingly, we truly need new concepts quickly.
Archie, the Internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running
I first went online in 1995 and back then Archie was still a thing. I spent countless hours digging through FTP servers. I remember finding some really cool stuff like source code or UNIX guides or what not. Most of the time I searched without finding anything though. Still, Archie was pretty cool.
Obsolete, but not gone: The people who won't give up floppy disks
I remember how huge the move from the 5 1/4” floppy disc to the 3 1/2” disc was - and even bigger was the audacity Steve Jobs had when he released the first Mac without a floppy disc drive. It’s insane that people are still using floppy discs to this day!
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
— Nico