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.
Technically 1/4” jacks were first. 1/8” only to make 1/4” smaller.
I bet USB 4 will be a jack
Solid body electric guitars- the first models have been in continuous production and are still available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fender_Telecaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Les_Paul
There were earlier "electric guitars" but I'm thinking all inventions build on previous creations. I don't think you'll find many pure answers to OPs question. I think the closest you'll find is going to be an advancement that produced a single step change in design that flattened the innovation curve forever after. I think the microwave oven was a great example.
Electric fuses also come to mind. Little has changed since 1890.
The bowl.
Ceramic might be better than wood
I appreciate the operation you’re running here
How materialistic of you, you can just use your hands!
🧷 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:
Saw a post just today with a 1000 year old folding chair. Looked pretty much identical to the ones used today. Lost the post but kept the picture.
Wow, things really haven't changed all that much, haha. Pretty sure you can get essentially that exact same design at outdoor stores.
Ones today would be mass produced from cheap materials though
RSS Feeds
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
you are supposed to get the feeds from the sites you visit, and build a single feed from that. basically build one feed from the various communities you follow.
The goal is to treat the various sources as potential sources, just like you subscribe to communities here. Instead of subscribing to a tech community, you can subscribe to the various tech news sites that you enjoy.
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
The headphone jack.
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.
I read your last sentence as "good girls" didn't change much :3
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 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.
I'll add Bic lighter to this list too.
What else does Bic make? 🤔
I was curious too so I looked it up.
Pens. Lighters. And razors for shaving. Mostly the single use ones.
But also
BIC has drawn criticism for maintaining its business operations in Russia after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
:C
I'll see your Bic and raise you Zippo!
Just got my first one a while back, I bought it 2nd hand and it's 7 years older than me and works better than any lighters I've borrowed off people over the years.
Replacement parts and even completely new lighter inserts still fit the original cases from the 1940s until now. And if something does break beyond you ability to repair, They got a lifetime warranty with no proof of purchase needed!
surfboards lol https://varialsurfboards.com/best-foam-surfboard/bic-review/
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:
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.
Well at first it looked and had a UX more like a regular oven, but yeah idk how much the internal tech has changed.
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 😅
nearly
I thought it changed a bunch through the years. Small changes tho
If you think C is perfect then I think your mother dropped you one too many.
"nearly" is, by definition, not.
How many sequels has it had? C++ (and Kava and C#), D, etc.
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.
Disagree - it's amazing me, buying a road bike for the first time in 10 years, just how much frames have changed in that time.
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
I'm surprised that I'm the first to say "p-trap" drain. Self-maintaining, no moving parts, affordable as anything, protects the indoors from sewer gas, catches rings. Chefs kiss 200 years old and still great
Lots of weight-training equipment. Bars, manuals etc.
Alternator Since its invention, the basic principle remained same, we are just finding a fancier ways to rotate it
The six classical machines.
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
Fire. No matter the fuel or the method, it still creates heat.
Dinner plates. Wooden, marble, ceramic or whatever it's made from, it does it's job perfectly.
EDIT: Yes, I'm hungry
The simple amphorae
Do they make marble dinner plates? Would be cool
ramps
deep-frying
the D-pad
Since you mention the d-pad. It was patented, so all the big companies had their own legally distinct spins on it. Nintendo has their cross; sega had a circle thing; Sony had discrete buttons, Microsoft had a different circle thing.
The Nintendo patent actually expired a number of years ago now, so nowadays the cross is showing up more places.
Paper clips.
They have some history
Maybe FM synthesis, it revolutionised the sound of the 1980s and music production as a whole
On a high level, all simple machines.
The wheel
The lever
The pulley
Etc.
All other machines (except maybe things like computer chips) are just a variation of simple machines, or a combination of them.
I like how this old teaching tool doesn't include an electric circuit.
It can if we include things such as power generators
The 707.
You.
No, you are!
I don't think QR codes have changed at all. Only the tools we use to scan them have
There are so many 2D barcode formats.
Did you know that you can halftone dither two different but same size QR codes on top of each other?
I wish I had a link to the article handy, but yeah I've tried that myself and it totally works! You basically get a 50/50 chance of one or the other code scanning. It's literally two QR codes in one!
And no, that's not some new special QR code format either, it's basically taking advantage of the nature of the scanners plus the built in error correction.
[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.
Old refrigerators before all the ice makers were added.
But super energy inefficient in comparison to what we have today.
Dildos
Silicone might be better than wood
But is it better than a big carrot? You can't snack on silicone.
Lego. Lego from now will still mate with Lego from 40 years ago without a problem. Apart from a growing number of shapes, the basic blocks are still the foundation of everything sold today.