Re:Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II
by dredmorbius on Friday July 15, 2022 @04:11PM
(#32112237)
There's an inherent resistance to change, even where it provides improvement.
Bernhard J. Stein's *Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937) is a fascinating read in this regard:
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
As Markdown: https://rentry.co/szi3g
I'd heard of it via Isaac Asimov who mentions it in his biography and a few other contexts. Asimov was Stern's research assistant, and incorporated the ideas into several of his own stories.
Sometimes it's surprising what nobody was interested in inventing. I think Grace Hopper is really important because people were resistant to the idea that programming the computer involved boring mindless steps which could be done by a machine and so of course instead of hand writing the program in machine code you should write a higher level language and have the machine translate that. It's incredible now, but this very idea was once an important invention and yet her superiors were not enthusiastic.