An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable"
Bret Victor / May 28, 2013 archive 
brough us here
> Carver Mead, father of VLSI and legendary engineering badass, gave a breathtaking talk at the 100-year anniversary of the Caltech Electrical Engineering department. The department was founded in 1910 by Royal Sorensen, whose field was power electronics. As Mead describes it, Sorensen came on the scene just as the era of innovation in power electronics was ending, and the state of the art had matured to essentially what we still have today. Sorensen chose a field that was already finished. The future was in signals -- information -- but who could see that? Here is the last minute of Mead's talk, and one of the most powerful and important statements you'll ever hear.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210514232443im_/https://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/Movies/CarverMead.mp4
We Can’t See the Thing, at All, That’s Going to Be the Most Important 100 Years from Now video
It certainly won't be software. Today, software is the dominant field of systems engineering. But before that, there were integrated circuits, and before that, discrete transistor circuits, and before that, vacuum tubes, and relays, and mechanical gears of all sorts, and on and on, back to the hand-axes. Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer was a mechanical masterpiece which no longer matters. I will not fix your vacuum tubes. I will not invent your Darlington pair. Any concept, technique, or tool that is specific to software engineering is guaranteed to have a short shelf life, at least on any time scale that I personally care about. (Which is totally fine if you're into that, but this is my ill-advised personal note, not yours, and I personally care about mattering 100 years from now.) So what lives on?