Crude
oil was first drilled in 1859 in northwestern Pennsylvania (not in the desert
of the Middle East). It was not long before oil lamps became ubiquitous,
lengthening the productive day for millions beyond daylight hours. Just fifty
or sixty years later, as electricity was beginning to replace the lamps, Ford’s
mass-produced automobile was taking off, providing an alternative use of crude
oil. For those of us alive in the early decades of the twenty-first century,
electric lighting indoors and cars on paved roads have been around as long as
we can remember. As a result, we tend to assume that things will go on pretty
much as they “always” have. Other than for computer technology, the end of the
first decade of the 21st century looks nearly indistinguishable from the last
thirty or forty years of the last century. As the second decade of the 21st century began,
applications based on computer technology were reaching a critical mass in
terms of triggering shifts in some industries that had seemingly “always” been
there. Books, music and movies were certainly among the fastest moving, perhaps
like the dramatic change in lighting and cars beginning a century and a half
before with the discovery of crude oil.
The full essay is at "Computer Technology Revolutionizing Industries."
