DIGITAL WATCH(1970)

HAMILTON WATCH COMPANY DEVELOPS A SPACE AGE TIMEPIECE.

The digital watch is one in which the time is displayed as a series of digital. In watch or quartz clock the battery sends electricity to quartz crystal through an electronic circuit. quartz crystal  at a precise frequency: exactly 32768 times each second.the digital and analog signals are used to transmit using electric signals.in an analog technology information is translated into electric pulses of varying amplitude.

The first wrist time piece to tell the time digitally was the Hamilton watch company "pulsar". This 18 carat gold cased device used a Red LED display to the the user what time it was In clean, crisp, twentieth century digital at the push of a simple button and retailed for a cool $2,100. Teething the problem meant the pulsar did not become commercial available until 1972, but when it was released, it caused many to think that the end had come for conventional dial face watches with mechanical movements. Hamilton claimed that their inspiration for developing a digital  watches was the futuristic digital clock that they had created for the  1968 film 2001: a space odyssey.

The only problem with the pulsar was the hefty accompanying price tag although many would argue that $2100 was cheap for the opportunity to look like James bond wearing a swanky gold digital watch. The answer for those who dud not want to pay so much for a watch canes from Texas instruments, who introduced the plastic strapped version that retailed  for just $20 in 1975 and soon after dropped to $10. This spelled the end for Hamilton and led to them becoming a  subsidiary of Seiko.

Development in digital watches continued the next three decade and included the use of liquid crystal displays to replace light emitting diode in  early 1970s . light emitting diode which could not always be left on due to their high level of power consumption. Through out the 1980 many amazing innovation were incorporated into digital display, including calculator, thermometer, language translators, and even miniature television.

some quartz watches are watches are designed to have extended battery life which can last up to 3 or more years. most of these watches do not have second hands. 

X RAY TELESCOPE(1978)

NASA Launches a super sensitive, orbiting telescope

The earth atmosphere is opaque to x ray spectrum so that x rays telescopes must be mounted on high altitude rockets, artificial satellite or balloons. XRT is designed to observe object in the X rays spectrum

X rays absorbed by the earth’s atmosphere so one has to climb above the atmosphere to see them. NASA’s Uhuru (1970) and the united kingdom’s Ariel V (1974) were spin stabilized satellite that discovered around 400 bright sources .astronomers realized that X ray provide vital clues to the detail throws of stars, specifically supernova explosions and the final transition to white dwarf, neutron star, and black hole states. X rays are a vital component of the radiation coming from energetic such as solar flares.

Ultraviolet telescopes study very hot stars and optical telescope study the visible light from space. because these rays (such as X rays, gamma rays, infrared, most ultraviolet) blocked by the outer atmosphere these type of light can only study from space

Two technical advances helped the development of space telescope. One was the construction of advanced Confocal mirror system and the other was the development of two dimensional X ray images gas scintillation proportional counters. Using these United States launched the first orbiting satellite containing a fully imaging X rays telescope, the high energy astrophysical observatory 2 (HEAO-2), In November 1978.

HEAO-2 was renamed “Einstein” when it was in orbit and operating correctly. Einstein discovered that nearly all astronomical bodies emit       X rays. Also the angular resolution and the sensitivity were such that accurate maps could be made of object such as the Cygnus loop supernova remnant. The Einstein instruments were a thousand times more sensitive than those on Uhuru.

Einstein remained operational until April 1981. Other space telescopes have followed, such as Exosat, Rosat, Chandra, and XXM Newton, and all have continued the quest or ever higher details and sensitive. In addition to new sources being discovered, it has been found that many X rays are being emitted as materials falls into the black holes at the center of active galactic nuclei.

    

PERSONAL STEREO(1977)

PAVEL PATENTS THE FIRST PORTABLE CASSETTE PLAYER.

A portable audio player, used with a light weight headphone or headset is called personal stereo. it is used to listen song while walking jogging and relaxing.

Given its market domination from the movement it first appeared in 1979, many people might imagine that the Sony Walkman was the original personal cassette player. Its iconic status is beyond question it all but created the vogue for listening music on the move and is direct antecedent of today’s ubiquitous iPod. And yet seven years earlier, a lone inventor with little expertise in the field of electronics came up with a concept that was almost identical.

The story begin Brazil in 1972 when a German born former TV executive named Andreas Pavel sought a way of listing a music while going about his everyday business. His idea was for a tiny portable cassette player not that much larger than the cassette itself that played back audio through a small pair of headphone. He called his novel idea the stereobelt, the first personal stereo

Having left brazil and move to Switzerland, Pavel made approaches to many of leading electronic manufactures, but none were interested in his idea they believed that few would be prepared to wear headphone in pubic in order to listen to music. Although Pavel failed to find a backer for his idea, his faith was unshaken and, during 1977, he filled parents for his invention across the globe.

One year later Sony launched their renowned Walkman to immediate acclaim Pavel set out on what turned out to be a marathon legal battle taking up most of the next twenty five years. It was eventually resolved in 2003, with an out of court settlement in which Sony is believed to have paid Pavel in excess of $10 million.

The first commercial personal stereo was Sony Walkman created by Akio Morita, Masaru Ibuka the co founder of Sony and Kozo Ohsone

INKJET PRINTER(1977)

Endo invents a new printing method.

Inkjet printer is a type of printer in which the letters are made with the help of ink. inkjet printing is type of computer printing that recreate the digital image. Most useful technological take time to mature; usually there are at least a couple of years between an idea’s conception and a final working model. When it comes to inkjet printing, however, it took much longer the patent for directing ink onto paper using electrostatic force was granted to Lord Kelvin in 1867.

Before the 1980s, printing from a computer was a slow, unrewarding task. The mechanisms behind those early printers used moving parts, bladders and pump that made them expensive, inefficient and clumsy. The modern inkjet was to change all this by using heat or electrostatic force to produce uniform droplets and precision results. In Japan in the 1970, canon and Hewlett Packard were competing with each other to produce the first reliable inkjet printer.

Hewlett Packard was beaten by a canon researcher named Ichiro Endo who invented the first thermal inkjet printer in 1977. He was inspired when he saw a syringe full of ink accidantly being touched with a hot soldering iron. The heat caused the ink to increase in volume and spurt out. Endo realized this was the solution to delivering controlled spurts of ink, and within the days he produced the working model that later became the canon bubble jet printer.

Both Hewlett Packard and canon put in patents within months of each other, and although there is much discussion about who invented what first. The two companies ended up sharing a lot of printing technologies with each other. The winner, with high quality cheaply produced printers available to all, was the home consumers. Now a day inkjet printers are used in any fields like in office, business, hospitals etc.

DVD(1995)

A CONSORTIUM UPGRADES VIDEO RECORDIN

DVDs short for digital versatile disc or digital video disc. CD/DVD drives were sold in 1997 and are widely used for storing movies, songs and other data. After the futuristic looking compact disc (CD) took the audio market by storm consigning the humble cassette tape to the back of a billion cupboards it was only a matter of time before technological wizards set their sights on abolishing the VHS tape.

Although the technology for laser disc already existed, it never really took off in the way that CD technology did, and so the market for a compact digital video disc was still very much open.. the first proposals for a high density CD were put forward in 1993, leading to the creation of two competing format, electronic powerhouse Sony and Phillips led their collected investors forward with MMCD format, going head to head with industry giants Toshiba, Masushita and time Warner’s effect, the SD. Then, in 1995, a combined efforts known as the DVD was officially announced and consequently developed by a consortium of ten companies.

The DVD is a digital optical disc format which is capable of storing two hours of high quality digital video, eight track of digital audio, and thirty two tracks of subtitle information, as well as offering the practical benefits of being light weight, compact, easily rewindable, and durable. Dual layer DVDs later doubled this capacity, and two sides DVDs doubled it again without creating needless bulk.

Although DVDs is often cited as being acronym for digital video disc or digital versatile disc, the official line on it as stated in 1999 by the 250 company members in the DVD forum is that it is simply a three letter name. So, in short, DVD stands for DVD 

ATOMIC LASER(1996)

KETTERLE DEVELOPES A WORKING ATOM LASER.

There is no rigorous definition for the atom laser or (an optical laser, for the matter) all the people agree that coherence and brightness is the essential feature.

The idea of the atom laser has been around for many years, and its principle is based on the more conventional optical laser. Normal laser emits light, but, unlike a normal lamp, the laser light is “coherent,” so that it can focus to a pinpoint, and also travel a long distance without spreading out like a flashlight beam. By the time the optical laser was introduced in 1960, scientists were already familiar with the wavelike properties of matter, and the atom laser was under consideration as a theoretical possibility. The atomic laser is analogous to an optical laser. Instead of electromagnetic waves the atom laser emits matters waves

But it was not until 1997 that reports of the first rudimentary working model were released. A bizarre form of super cooled matter called Bose Einstein condensate made it all possible. This strange stuff, in which the individual atom “loss their identity” and coalesce into a single “blob,” is in some ways like the photons of light in a laser. It was Professor Wolfgang Ketterle and his colleagues who first managed to produce a Bose Einstein condensate in 1995.

Not long afterward, in November 1996, Ketterle and his team cheered as their atom laser worked for the first time. They had successfully used a Bose Einstein condensate as a source of coherent atom to create a “mater wave”. Described like a dripping faucet, it emitted pulses of droplets of atom, each containing up to several million atoms.

Practical use of the atom laser yet to materialize, and it is confined to research at present. However, it is likely that atom lasers will be used in the future to directly deposit atom onto computer chips, enabling the creation of much smaller, finer patterns and more powerful computer.

The atomic and molecular sample are cooled down to near absolute zero through the interaction with one or more laser field is called laser cooling   

SURFACE COMPUTING(2006)

MICROSOFT TAKES THE PERSONAL COMPUTER OFF TABLES- TO BECOME THE TABLE ITSELF

Microsoft has established the new branch computer with surface is known as surface computing. These computer interact with the users through ordinary object instead of using keyboard, monitors. 

In 2006 Microsoft announced a new way in which a human can interact with a computer. The mouse and the key board are thrown way and replace with the table top containing an embedded rear projection touch screen. Behind the screen, inside the table, are five cameras with overlapping fields of view. These can look through the screen and programmed to recognize or red items that are placed on the screen. These cameras can also recognize physical object, track hand gestures and the movements of the pens and brushes, and the read credit cards and “loyalty” cards.

The software supports a multitude of touch points so many people can use the computer at once. A single user can also multitask. For example, if the digital camera is paced on the computer table, the computer immediately recognize that is a camera, download the stored images, and shown them on the table top screen. Enlarging the image is done simply by touching two opposite corners of the images and moving the fingers apart. Dragging song into and out of the music player is done in similar operations. He aim is to replicate everyday intuitive manipulative interactions.

At the presence time the Microsoft surface is expensive and aimed at holes, public entertainment venues, stores, and restaurant, but soon people could be browsing through music and book lists and downloading specific items, playing video poker, and ordering beer and food. Computer game technology could be revolutionized by these devices, and they could also be used with a real brush and a virtual palette to paint computer pictures in real time.