It's the year 2028, and, as in Stephen Colbert's "future perfect," the embedded systems industry is "looking back" at what was and will be. It's a time warp, time capsule, and wishful thinking all rolled into one.
By 2008, we congratulated ourselves on how quickly the industry progressed from systems that only the government could afford to systems appearing in every quotidian device, industry process, and specialized machine. In the 37 intervening years after the first microprocessor appeared in 1971, we'd stuck an embedded system in almost everything we could think of.
Future fun
Here are some entertaining references for the time traveler:
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Our next steps were to connect all those systems to the Internet and improve their reliability while making the design process cheaper, easier, and faster. We knew we had a long way to go. Not only was there a global environmental, economic, and resource crisis to address, but we had a coding crisis. The number of lines of code needed to create our complex systems was growing exponentially and the programmers still often crafted their software by hand. We had plenty of tools to aid us but were slow to adopt them. You'd think Joe the engineer had plenty of job security.
Life wasn't all glorious back then. In 2008, the energy crisis was in full swing with high oil prices and worries about climate change. Not only was the weather going crazy, but the economy had major issues. Engineers had angst about wages and job security. Then that short-lived mini depression struck at the end of 2008. We were facing some dark days, but thanks to global cooperation and our adaptability as humans, we pulled through for a better life and a better planet. Embedded systems played a big role. See for yourself...
In 2008, Susan Rambo was the managing editor of Embedded Systems Design but lost her job to an ambitious robot intern in 2010.
