The rapid advances possible with computer tech and software have misled people into overestimating what is possible.

Putting video over a copper line is largely a software advance.

Getting heavy objects into the air and keeping them there is mechanics and progress will be incremental and slow by comparison.

Both are technology.

But here you are right as well: software technology is in many cases overestimated.
Currently, progress is not as fast. We still type with the same qwerty keyboard as in the 1860s. Since the flat screen, display technology is not gone so fast anymore the last 10 years as they still have glare problems in daylight and are not reflective.

But other technologies as well. In the 1970s, a permanent lunar base was expected around 2000, and manned flights to Mars were already done.

So, we really don't know how we fly in the 2040s and beyond. I bet the same jet engine technology, but with even less fuel consumption per passenger distance. And probably (partly) renewable energy.

Advances in data transmission - and computer techology, AFAIK, have not breached any laws of physics.

Alternative propulsion for flight still have hard and fast laws against them, of weight/mass, friction, thermodynamics, among many. It may be possible to develop a very energy-dense battery, and it may be possible to beam energy in waves, and it may be possible to make synthetic fuels relatively affordable but all those laws have to be observed.

I did observe with interest that NASA has supposedly proven in theory a rocket engine that defies Newton's 3rd Law of Motion.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/201...tion-or-sci-fi

A friend who's an engineer was convinced that data were being stuffed through phone wires far faster than the Shannon limit he'd learned in college allowed. He was forgetting that the limit he'd learned was for phone wires equipped with the chokes that Ma Bell used to install to reduce noise. :)

Data limits through copper might well have increased. But what really changed to allow video and audio was compression technology - i.e software solutions.

The incredible advances made through applying software solutions have led many commentators to be over-optimistic about material solutions.

Or, as Scotty allegedly said, "ye canna change the laws of physics".

I think it was some of each. My Google skills are failing me and I can't the reference, but I recall reading that the old 56.5 Kbps modems achieved something very close to the Shannon limit for the pre-1988 telephone network. The limit was relatively low because of load coils that acted as 3400 Hertz low-pass filters installed on the cables. Rolling out DSL involved removing the coils, leading to a new Shannon limit that's two or three orders of magnitude higher.

Once the physics and electronics are in place, it's up to the software to exploit them.

They advanced together ajGoes, so yes, some of each.

The Germans who invented mp3 (and AAC too, not lot of people know that) had to wait about 20 years for certain technical improvements and market conditions, like more widespread broadband and mass market mp3 players , before their invention really gained momentum.

So even that "sudden" revolution took about 25 years in total, and against a lot of resistance.

Part of their story told in the book How Music Got Free , which you have probably read. Well worth it if you haven't.

Or it took that much time for the technology to implement it to be developed?

There are a lot of inventions that are theoretically possible but engineering knowledge and material science haven't allowed their development to be economically (or technologically) feasible.

Though supermagnets have been commercially developed and are available, a lot of spinoffs from Strategic Defense Initiative (a.k.a. "star wars") R&D spending of the '80s still haven't been developed into commercial technology.

As for what the future could hold, think space elevator, or more appropriately for air transport, SCRAMjets.

The synfuel for aircraft is a step closer:

http://www.flyertalk.com/articles/fo...al-flight.html