The technical legacies of the space shuttle are also impressive in ways that many people outside the world of aerospace technology may never notice.
Furthermore, software issues like technical debt and legacy system components may exacerbate this.
Furthermore, the complexity and lack of technical uniformity in legacy SCADA systems often obscures their core operational semantics, making regulatory compliance monitoring only available to personnel with intimate knowledge about the system.
For massive enterprises, unbundling represents a key countermeasure against inertia and stagnation, as well as a valuable strategy to battle more agile competitors — innovative startups who aren't bogged down by the same legacy technical debt and the engineering bureaucracy that comes with it.
I find it mesmerising when journalists and politicians conspire to debate the issue, never telling the technical truth of the legacy, mostly because they don't know.
There's surely also a book in Columbia's legacy of technical innovation, notably its vital role in the development of electrical recording in the 1920s and the long-playing 33·-r.p.m. album in the 1940s.
However, my experiences as director of the Science Museum from 2007-10, exploring the legacy of technical innovation on public display and held in its reserve collection, and of working with engineers on space projects during the exhilarating era of the 70s and 80s, convinces me that human ingenuity is unbounded and that technological advances can be very rapid.
Data collection often hinges upon either manual chart review or ad hoc requests to technical experts who support legacy clinical systems.
The ITER Project Team now coming together in Cadarache is currently being shaped from the old, preserving the legacy of technical know-how built up in the ITER Joint Central Team since 1992.
These so-called Smarter Planet projects build on its legacy of broad technical skills and deep knowledge in fields like energy, transportation and health care.
