Most technologies continue to improve with innovation, like WiFi. What is a technology that was nearly perfect upon conception?
The 3.5mm audio jack. It's so fundamentally simplistic from a manufacturing standpoint and circuitry standpoint that any headset you throw at it will work identically without fail (the key innovation being the speakers or headphones where the analog signal is sent to).
I disagree. The connector is fragile, subject to dust, contacts can wear out and audio quality suffers. Faulty connection means you have to twist it the correct way to have audio. Tug on your cable the wrong way and the connector on your phone is broken. Multiple standards for pinout for microphone and stereo. May cause shorts because every ring touches when plugging in. Disconnects too easily if the connector is fatigued, no locking mechanism.
At this point it would be better to reserve a few pins on a USB C connector to pass audio data. But not sure if analog can transmit fine with all the serial cables around it.
The Bic pen. Sure, you can make it better, but then the price has to go up. You can still buy a nearly unchanged Bic pen from any office store for cheaper than any other writing tool, nearly identical to what they looked like when they were first invented.
The MIDI protocal. The technologies that use it have evolved in all sorts of ways, but the protocol has remained unchanged.
MPE and MIDI 2.0 would like a word zir
That’s fair. But the fact that MIDI 1.0 isn’t going away anytime soon shows how good it was from conception. From Sweetwater:
Because MIDI 2.0 coexists well with MIDI 1.0, it’s likely MIDI 1.0 devices will continue to be produced in the future if MIDI 2.0’s features are not needed for a particular application. In developing MIDI 2.0, backward compatibility with MIDI 1.0 was always a priority.
MIDI 2.0 is not about replacing the original specification but about adding features that enhance the spec with features users have wanted almost since MIDI 1.0 appeared.
MIDI protocol for users might be good enough but for developers is a nightmare if you want to do advanced synthesis
Maybe not perfect upon conception, but after a couple of decades from common adoption, the bicycle really didn't change much. Sure, you can use lighter and more advanced materials, you can add an electric motor to it (though I wouldn't classify it as a bycicle) but you can probably take a 100 years old bike and it would work just as good as a modern one.
It also too about 100 years to reach the modern design of rubber tyres and a drive train, with the rider sitting slightly forward of the rear axle and well behind the front wheel.
Have you seen belt drive bikes? Not the electric ones. Pretty cool stuff, much lower maintenance. Also internal gear hubs. There's still innovation happening in bicycles to make them stronger against abuse
I did almost consider an internal gear hub for my bike but they are not common so not sure if parts of maintenance may be difficult to come by. Also not really sure how I could fit one myself. Maybe some day though, I think some can manage quite a few gears.
Fine with a chain though, mine is wax instead of oil lubricated.
I think sewing machines would count? They certainly got a hell lot more "portable", but the basic design hasn't changed much since the 1880s. Those things are little mechanical marvels
Well, for "normal" ones they changed a lot about the lower thread. Also there came overlock machines to make life easier for certain stitches.
But nonetheless, they are marvelous machines, I love them so much. It is mechanic porn, and granted, the design of the old ones was perfect. Don't need all that plastic 😅
The bowl.
What’s wrong with drinking out of your hands?!
Found Diogenes' account!
Ceramic might be better than wood
How materialistic of you, you can just use your hands!
Dinner plates. Wooden, marble, ceramic or whatever it's made from, it does it's job perfectly.
EDIT: Yes, I'm hungry
Do they make marble dinner plates? Would be cool
The simple amphorae
ramps
deep-frying
the D-pad
Wireguard. I haven’t heard of any huge changes to it over the years. And it somehow just works
My work WiFi blocks WireGuard and OpenVPN connections, which is a huge bummer. I just want to be able to connect to my NAS while I’m at work, but IT doesn’t want to hear that.
At least I can still use IKEv2 with my commercial VPN, so my employer can’t see how much I browse on Lemmy throughout the day.
I may be wrong on how they "detect" VPN traffic but the lazy way would be to block the common "default" ports used by those services. If they are just blocking this port you could change what port you use. While it does come with its own issues as its a common scanned port changing the port to something like 80 or 443 and "look" like normal internet traffic. Might get around their block.
Meanwhile I just tried to set up a VPN connection for my laptop and can't get wireguard to work properly
🧷 Safety pin. There has been a little change in the safety cap but that's to save material not functionality or manufacturing.
The entire process is the same:
Paper clips.
It's very niche, but the only thing I could come up with is Kvevri, a traditional Georgian winemaking vessel. They're sold today (and still used for their stated purpose, aging wine), I've personally seen kvevris with the exact same shape buried in a wine cellar of 12th century monastery, and at least going by the article they're like 8000 years old, and haven't changed much in that time.
My other ideas were:
Velcro? Inspired by nature's invention
https://www.microphotonics.com/biomimicry-burr-invention-velcro/
Also outdoor grills don't seem to have changed much other than the material used to keep the fire going.
Lots of weight-training equipment. Bars, manuals etc.
Maybe FM synthesis, it revolutionised the sound of the 1980s and music production as a whole
[off topic?]
I can't remember the exact quote, but Robert A. Heinlein said of the DC-3 that it was the best airplane ever built, and that the only way to improve it was to completely redesign it.
I just like the idea that some things are perfect the way they are.
I know Heinlein had his problems, but in highschool I loved his books.
The line is in 'Glory Road,' a great fantasy book that takes pretty much every fantasy trope and kicks it to the curb.
Transistor. It was so far ahead of its time it is still being argued to be alien tech to this day.
I mean this thread is about tech that was perfect from it's inception to the point where it didn't or barely improved. Nothing could be further from the truth, transistor tech has had literally trillions of dollars and millions of smart people's careers poured into it, and semiconductor IC manufacturing is now the most complicated single activity that our species does.
The 707.
The six classical machines.
Alternator Since its invention, the basic principle remained same, we are just finding a fancier ways to rotate it
Microwave oven. It sort of just...appeared, and the design didn't change much.
In my Flat we still have a microwave that does not have a rotating plate. Insteadt it has a spinning rotor in the roof that deflects the waves in order to cook food evenly. It works well but it is needlessly complicated compared to modern microwaves.
Internet Protocol.
ipv4 remains dominant.
tcp and ip merged in like 1973, and it lived in labs till 82 or 83. after that its been 40 years of nearly perfect ip spec
Not because it's perfect but because its wide deployment means it takes a lot of effort to replace
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Really? I tried a bunch of time and don't see the appeal. I haven found any like category filtering so I can't subscible to like just tech or whatever. I think I'm doing it wrong