"Reaching the Moon was certainly a highlight for our civilization, but it was a singular accomplishment. The one technological thing that most blows my mind is the one which made that lunar landing possible, is the civilization's greatest technical achievement of all, which is repeated every single day, and which is remarkably overlooked.
I refer, of course, to the computer, but not the computer itself as an artifact. Rather, the industrial nature of the computer. The computer is, far and away, the single-most sophisticated artifact human beings have created to date. But that's not the amazing bit. The amazing bit is that, in a span of one generation, this machine went from being a big as a house and costing as much as -and being made in much the same way as- the Space Shuttle to a ubiquitous mass-produced device you can put in your pocket, has increased exponentially in performance as it shrank, is so simple in composition that you can teach a child to assemble one in an hour, and is so cheap that even people who can't afford a home or a car can afford a computer more powerful than the ones that put men on the Moon.
And that's just the half of it. This is the first whole-world industrial product. With a just a little information, anyone can mail-order the parts for an entire PC, with no two parts coming from the same company or even the same part of the world, and you can put it together and -at least 9 times out of 10- it will run the first time you switch it on! There is no other device or product in the world you can say this about, though as a trend many other types of products are today heading in this direction.
But none of this is the mind-blowing part. The mind-blowing part is that few to none of the people running the major corporations that contributed to this astounding feat have more than a very rudimentary comprehension of how this happened or how the industry today actually works -which is why they keep making many of the same dumb executive decisions over and over again. They don't see the forest for the trees. This radically different industrial paradigm -this vast interdependent 'industrial ecology' of otherwise competitive international companies- evolved almost entirely ad hoc, driven by a near-religious conviction in the potential of the technology by a small community of technorati and the need to cope with a technology too complicated and expensive for any one company alone -not even IBM- to develop in isolation. This is the single greatest accomplishment of the Industrial Age -and it was largely accidental."
