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cousin_it 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?
Would the first spreadsheet (VisiCalc) or the first browser (Mosaic) fit your bill? As far as I know, they didn't face difficult hardware bottlenecks when they appeared.
VisiCalc is a great example, but Mosaic was hardly the first browser. Nelson and Engelbart certainly had hypertext browsers before. I'm not entirely sure that they had graphics, but I think so. Have you seen Engelbart's 1968 demo? (ETA: I'm not sure that Engelbart's demo counts, but even if it doesn't, he clearly cared about both hypertext and graphics, so he probably did it in the following decade or two)
Speaking of Engelbart, how about the mouse as an example? Did that take a nontrivial amount of the computing power when first demoed, or not?
I'd guess that the computing power devoted to the mouse in a graphical environment is always small compared to that devoted to the screen, and thus it should be a good example. (if one used a mouse to manipulate an array of characters, as sounds like a good idea for a spreadsheet, the mouse might be relatively expensive, but that's not what Engelbart did in '68)
The mouse and the browser (and magfrump's similar example of AIM) are probably examples of a phenomenon that generalizes your original question, where the bottleneck to deployment was something other than computer power.