Three interesting examples of IT solutions from different decades

Trackball, 1949

Description:

Trackball - handheld pointing input device for a computer. This device is similar to a mouse in terms of the principle of operation and functions: it allows you to enter information about the relative movement by rotating the ball fixed in the body with your hand and giving commands by pressing the buttons.

History:

Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff

The trackball was actually invented around 1949 by Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff, two Canadian engineers who were working on a better way to coordinate target data displayed on the then-modern radar system CRT display they were developing. Named "DATAR", the original trackball used a 4" Canadian duck bowling ball and weighed several pounds. The DATAR project was eventually canceled, but the idea of ​​using a trackball to position the cursor and select items on a computer display screen using XY axis orthogonal outputs survived, and trackballs were eventually incorporated into radar tracking and fire control systems by a number of defense contractors around the world.

Engelbart's original mouse So the trackball was already a fairly mature special purpose military/industrial input device in the late 50's/early 60's when Doug Englebart began his pioneering work at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) on human-computer user interfaces and your mouse. Also, a mouse far from an inverted trackball, the mouse for which Englebart finally received his original patent in 1970 (the patent was issued well after his original design in 1963) was cut from a block of wood and used orthogonal direct drive wheels to mice. The X and Y axes, rather than the now-familiar cage ball or optical sensors (the "ball mouse" was invented by Bill English, another SRI graduate, in 1972). Arguments about the superiority of direct drive orthogonal mice over ball mice and optical mice remain persistent mouse heresy to this day.

Optical Fiber, 1970

Description:

Optical fiber is the thinnest wires (threads) made of glass or plastic and allows you to transmit signals in the form of light. Optical fiber cable is used as a way to transmit information at high speed over long distances. The main purpose is the transfer of information between equipment. Thanks to the capabilities of optical fiber, today it is used everywhere to provide communication through local, metropolitan and long-distance networks.

History:

In 1970 one team of researchers began experimenting with fused silica, a material capable of extreme purity with a high melting point and a low refractive index. Corning Glass researchers Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz invented fiber optic wire or "Optical Waveguide Fibers" (patent #3,711,262) capable of carrying 65,000 times more information than copper wire. This wire allowed for information carried by a pattern of light waves to be decoded at a destination even a thousand miles away. The team had solved the problems presented by Dr. Kao.

Robert Mauer, Donald Keck and Peter Shultz

In 1975 The United States government decided to link the computers at the NORAD headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain using fiber optics to reduce interference.

In 1977 the first optical telephone communication system was installed about 1.5 miles under downtown Chicago. Each optical fiber carried the equivalent of 672 voice channels.

By the end of the century, more than 80 percent of the world's long-distance traffic was carried over optical fiber cables and 25 million kilometres of cable. Maurer, Keck, and Schultz-designed cables have been installed worldwide.

Blockchain, 1991

Description:

Blockchain is a continuous chain of blocks. It contains all records of transactions. Unlike conventional databases, these records cannot be changed or deleted, only new ones can be added.

History:

Blockchain technology was described in 1991 by research scientists Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta. They wanted to present a computationally practical solution for timestamping digital documents so that they could not be backdated or counterfeited. They are developing a system that uses the concept of a cryptographically secure chain of blocks to store time stamped documents.

Stuart Haber and W.Scott Stornetta

Merkle trees were incorporated into the design in 1992, making the blockchain more efficient by allowing multiple documents to be collected into a single block. Merkle trees are used to create a "secure blockchain". It stores a series of data records, and each data record is linked to the previous one. The newest entry in this thread contains the history of the entire thread. However, this technology was not used and the patent expired in 2004.

In 2004, computer scientist and cryptographic activist Hal Finney introduced a system called Reusable Proof Of Work (RPoW) as a prototype for digital money. This was an important early step in the history of cryptocurrencies. The RPoW system worked by receiving a non-exchangeable or fungible proof-of-work token based on Hashcash in return, creating an RSA-signed token that could then be transferred from person to person.

RPoW solved the problem of double spending by keeping ownership of the tokens registered on a trusted server. This server has been designed to allow users around the world to check its correctness and integrity in real time.

Further, in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto conceptualized the theory of distributed blockchains. It enhances the design in a unique way by adding blocks to the initial chain without requiring them to be signed by trusted parties. The modified trees will contain a secure data exchange history. It uses a peer-to-peer network to time-stamp and validate each exchange. It could be administered autonomously without requiring a central authority. These improvements have been so useful that they have made blockchains the backbone of cryptocurrencies. Today, the design serves as a public ledger for all transactions in the cryptocurrency space.

Satoshi Nakamoto

The evolution of blockchains has been stable and promising. The words "block" and "chain" were used separately in the original article by Satoshi Nakamoto, but eventually became popular as a single word "blockchain" by 2016. Recently, the file size of the cryptocurrency blockchain, containing records of all transactions that have occurred on the network, has been from 20 GB to 100 GB.

Sources:

https://computermouse.umwblogs.org/invention/#:~:text=The%20first%20trackball%20was%20invented,was%20supported%20by%20air%20bearings.&text=The%20first%20light%20pen%20was%20invented%20by%20Ben%20Gurley%20in%201959.
https://www.trackballworld.com/trackball-history.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackball
https://www.thoughtco.com/birth-of-fiber-optics-4091837
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
https://www.javatpoint.com/history-of-blockchain
https://aivia.io/blog/en/what-is-a-blockchain/
http://computermouse.umwblogs.org/files/2011/02/fp6000_trackball.jpg
https://thedayintech.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/gates_and_allen_450px.jpg
https://images.tedium.co/2017/10/1012_slewball.jpg
https://www.mikroe.com/img/images/Fiber-Optic-cable-e1358343011863.jpg
https://nationalmedals.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Robert-D-Maurer.jpg
https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.al-fanarmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/26160334/source-Hoyes1.jpg
https://coingeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Stuart-Haber-and-Scott-Stornetta-How-our-timestamping-mechanism-was-used-in-Bitcoin-1200x720.jpg
https://cryptocake1.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Satoshi-Nakamoto-1024x683.jpg
https://calsoftinc.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2.png