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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?
What about BitTorrent or P2P file transfers in general? Anonymous peer to peer seems to have not emerged until 2001, or peer to peer in general until November 1998. That's a bit too far back for me to have any idea what computers were like but peer to peer file transfer is an amazing software development which could be implemented on any computers that can transfer files--at least as early as 1977.