The technical term for this is path dependence: an early decision constrains everything afterwards, not because it was right but because too much was built on top of it. Here…
Weaving was invented independently in every inhabited part of the world, which is a strong indication that the problem has a limited number of solutions. Here are eleven of the…
Before printing, every copy of every text was made by hand and therefore differed from every other copy. Almost everything below follows from that changing. Here are sixteen.
1. Paper…
Source: Wikipedia
None of these vanished dramatically. They thinned out over a decade or two, until the last practitioners were curiosities rather than colleagues. Here are fifteen.
1. Switchboard Operator
Source:…
Military research has a habit of producing things nobody anticipated, which then outlive the purpose they were built for. These twelve are all in ordinary use now, and all began…
Source: Wikipedia
The QWERTY layout is one of the most successful pieces of interface design in history, in the narrow sense that essentially everyone uses it and nobody can dislodge it.…