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The twelve greatest designs of the last 100 years
- Thread starter steingar
- Start date
What a silly self-serving list.
If one measures "great" software by how wide spread it gets used in terms of applications, then the design of the Unix operating system (and C computer language) is a strong candidate. If you are reading this on an iPhone, iPad, (BSD Unix) or Android device (Linux Unix) the underlying operating system design has roots going back to 1969.ScottM said:The design was great, booted DOS from the home computing market.
Unix has been used for decades in what are known as Class 5 telephone switches (the machines that handle POTS telephone call routing) and were intended to be 99.999% reliable (known in the trade as five nines reliability.)
Unix was showing up in a lot of machines well before Linux arrived on the desktop.
Likewise the design/invention of the field effect transistor has to rank among the top ten design advances of all time.
But you can't combine zillions of them if you first don't have a design for at least one. Bipolar junction transistors existed but used too much power to scale to zillions in small spaces.flyingcheesehead said:Yeah, but FETs alone aren't all that compelling - It's when you combine zillions of them into an integrated circuit that the real magic happens.
Anyway the list in the OP article was silly for too many reasons.