The windows of the room that our home office currently occupies look out over the railway tracks that feed into Richmond railway station. Every time a train goes past, Oscar my 15-month-old son chimes “Choo! Choo!”. We've taught him a language that comes from a form of technology (steam trains) that even I in my advanced years don't remember other than in museums.
Similarly, no doubt, we'll tell him to give someone a “ring” when he should telephone them, or listen to a “track” of music. Again, language that belies technologies that are no longer with us.
I was in Twitter conversation with @elfod earlier in the week following my piece about how the old can stifle innovation in the new. The question arose – what was the last truly innovative software innovation (from a user perspective, rather than underlying infrastructure). My view – the browser. It's actually one of the few things that can only really exist within a computer environment that doesn't have a real-world parallel (where word processor=typewriter and so on).
The WWW and Berners-Lee's innovations of the early 1990s are remarkably ubiquitous now, although the ideas of hypertext go back all the way to Vannevar Bush's futurology in the 1940s. However, the language of the Web and browser will almost certainly shape (and constrain) the way in which technologies are formed going forward. “Bookmarks” and “Favourites” for example (and of course the former is directly taken from the oldest of information systems, the book!).
In fact, have there ever been any really quantum leaps in technological innovation, or is it all just varying levels of evolution?
mmitII 