Comments on: Technology history quiz

By: Computing before Fortran — The Endeavour

Computing before Fortran — The Endeavour — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:27:58 +0000

[...] Technology history quiz Doing good work with bad tools [...]

By: BruceA

BruceA — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:47:02 +0000

The only one I knew for sure was the mouse, which I knew was invented the year I was born. And yet I can remember a time when nobody used mice. Not one of these technologies seems as old as it really is.

By: John

John — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:10:48 +0000

Gene, very interesting.

By: Gene Harris

Gene Harris — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:07:16 +0000

I made zero out of 10.

I was a graduate student at UAB in 1974. I remember receiving a tiny amount of animal tissue from a surgery. We ground the material into a solution using DMSO as the solvent. I ran an NMR on the material at room temperature. The signal was just a giant glob on the graph paper. I wondered whether anyone would ever get anything useful out of NMR on human tissue because of the high concentration of water.

Several months (or a year) later at a regional ACS meeting in Charleston, another investigator showed us his results. They were only slightly more refined than my results. (Bigger, better, stronger magnet.)

Couple of years later some whiz bangs out of California (can’t remember who) showed us some visual renderings they were able to produce by interpreting the signals in more than one dimension.

All I can remember is the early work wasn’t nearly as promising as the final results of today’s instrumentation.

By: John

John — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:51:21 +0000

I might have gotten zero out of ten. I can’t say since of course I made the quiz after I knew the answers.

By: mat roberts

mat roberts — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:46:29 +0000

zero out of ten – I rule