On the structure of computing revolutions
I recently read an article mocking its own authors for failing to recognise that the iPhone (or some particular version of it) would instigate a revolution. Unfortunately I didn't record where I read this, and I haven't been able to find it again after later thinking about what constitutes a "revolution", and what it might feel like to live through one.
My immediate reaction upon reading the article was: are you sure you weren't right the first time? I, at least, don't feel like I've been through a revolution any time in the past ten years, or, indeed, my entire life. Sure, technology has steadily improved, but I've only ever perceived it as "evolution". I have no doubt that someone catapulted into 2012 from the time of my birth in the 1970's would find much to be amazed about. But, having lived through all of the intervening years myself, I had the much more mundane experience of seeing the changes one product at a time.
This begs the question: how much change is required, and how sudden does it need to be, to constitute a "revolution"? When talking of the history of computing to my computer systems students, I often talk of "trends" from analogue to digital, from stand-alone computers to networked ones, and from single-core to multi-core CPUs. I say "trend" because I perceive the changes as a gradual process of older products being replaced one-by-one by newer products. But proponents of the iPhone (or digital or network or multi-core) revolution presumably perceive the changes as one big leap from existing products to a spectacular new entrant. (Either that, or they use the word "revolution" to mean "any perceptible change".)
Now, many small changes may add to up to a big one. Someone of my mind born in Britain in 1800, say, might have observed machines or factories appearing one at a time over his or her life time. But that person's lifetime now seems short compared to the span of human history, and we consequently refer to that period as the Industrial Revolution. Still, I suspect that future historians will be looking at more than iPhones when they decide what to call the current period.
One of my students foreshadowed the taxonomic problems awaiting future historians when he observed to me that the articles he had been reading disagreed about what era of computing we currently enjoyed. I forget the exact list of candidate eras, but one might have been the "mobile era" and another the "network era", and so on. Off the cuff, I suggested two explanations: firstly, that his sources were talking crap, and, secondly, that his sources were talking about two different aspects of computing.
The two explanations might not be mutually exclusive. Perhaps the iPhone revolutionised mobile telephony/computing for some definition of "revolution", but I didn't notice this revolution because I do relatively little telephony and mobile computing. But the iPhone didn't revolutionise other aspects of computing -- let alone biotechnology or space travel or any of numerous other technologies of the modern period -- so attributing a broader revolution to it would seem to be a load of crap.
