Decades ago, Ken Olsen, the chairman and co-founder of DEC said, "When I was a teenager in the late 30s and early 40s, electronics wasn't a word. You were interested in radio if you were interested in electronics". I’m reminded of his quote every time I open a search engine to look for a new component or device.
The trouble with applying other people's new and innovative ideas is first finding out that those ideas exist. In many cases, we don't yet have words describing the concepts, we don't know where to look for them and we may not even know we should look for them. Search engines can’t tell us what to look for yet, they can only answer the questions we type in the box.
This problem is as applicable in design engineering and electronics in 2012 as it was when Olsen made his comment about radio. In my own sector – industrial portable memory, this is particularly true. As engineers, our response is often to simply re-invent the wheel - but unfortunately not every wheel we invent is as efficient as the first.
In memory, as in so many sub sectors of design engineering, developing your own device rather than opting for a specialist solution might be more costly than it seems at first glance. Similarly, choosing to adapt a commercially available memory solution, like a USB or SDHC card, can prove expensive in the long term. The answer isn’t as complicated as it seems – it’s a case of finding out what other people call the product you are looking for. If in the 30s Electronics wasn’t a word – I wonder what industrial memory will be called in a few decades’ time?
