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magfrump comments on Open Thread September, Part 3 - Less Wrong
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I'm working on a top-level post about AI (you know what they say, write what you don't know), and I'm wondering about the following question:
Can we think of computer technologies which were only developed at a time when the processing power they needed was insignificant?
That is, many technologies are really slow when first developed, until a few cycles of Moore's Law make them able to run faster than humans can input new requests. But is there anything really good that was only thought of at a time when processor speed was well above that threshold, or anything where the final engineering hurdle was something far removed from computing power?
How significant of a technology are you thinking of?
For example, I would guess that most video game emulators came about when computers were much faster than the games they were emulating--if it weren't the case that fast computers were cheaper than the emulated consoles emulators wouldn't be very popular. Further, I can guarantee you that computers easily have more power than video game consoles, so any emulator produced of the latest generation of console was written when computers had far more power than necessary.
So: Does a new emulator count? It's a specific technology that is developed in a fast environment. Does an old emulator count? Emulators in general aren't new technology at all. Does an instant messenger count? Predecessors existed in times when text content was a big deal, but I would be mildly surprised to hear that the original AIM (or whatever the first instant messenger program was) was created at a time when text-over-the-internet was a big stress on computers.