How Has Technology Changed In The Past 10 Years

Product, Games, Technology, Competition event, Facial hair, Advertising,

Michael Stillwell

On whatever normal day, you might buckle your seatbelt, get greenbacks from an ATM, cheque the news on your cellphone. Chances are, these things feel unremarkable—but information technology wasn't so long ago that they each would take been utterly unthinkable. Thanks to half dozen and a half decades of remarkable scientific and technological innovation, 2020 looks very fiddling like 1954. From Velcro to virtual reality, LEDs to Facebook, these are the 66 tiptop life-irresolute inventions of our time.

1954: Microwave Oven

In 1945 Raytheon's Percy Spencer stands in front of a magnetron (the power tube of radar) and feels a candy bar first to melt in his pocket: He is intrigued. When he places popcorn kernels in front end of the magnetron, the kernels explode all over the lab. Ten years later Spencer patents a "radar range" that cooks with high-frequency radio waves; that same year, the Tappan Stove Co. introduces the first home microwave model.

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1955: Polio Vaccine

The yr Jonas Salk finds a way to prevent polio, there are 28,985 global cases; by 2017, the number drops to 22.

Honorable Inventions: Velcro, TV remote control

1956: Hard Drive

IBM releases the first computer hd, the 2,000-pound-plus, refrigerator-size IBM 305 RAMAC, which introduces magnetic deejay storage. Up until then, files were either kept on spools of magnetic tape or on good erstwhile-fashioned paper, with no way to jump right to the tape yous wanted to pull upward. With the RAMAC, a mechanical arm would call back data by storing data at a detail magnetic orientation. This technology goes on to be used (at a smaller size) in laptops and computer servers everywhere.

1957: Birth Command Pill

Enovid, a drug the FDA approves for menstrual disorders, comes with a warning: The mixture of synthetic progesterone and estrogen as well prevents ovulation. Two years later, more than half a million American women are taking Enovid—and not all of them have cramps. In 1960 the FDA approves Enovid for use equally the commencement oral contraceptive.

Honorable Invention: Three-Point Seat Belt

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1958: Jet Airliner

The Boeing 707-120 debuts every bit the world's offset successful commercial jet airliner, ushering in the era of attainable mass air travel. The iv-engine plane carries 181 passengers and cruises at 600 mph for up to v,280 miles on a full tank. The first commercial jet flying takes off from New York and lands in Paris; domestic service soon connects New York and Los Angeles.

Honorable Invention: Laser Beam, Super Glue

1959: Integrated Circuit

The offset general-purpose computer, the most thirty-ton ENIAC (1947), contains 18,000 vacuum tubes, lxx,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors. In 1959, the integrated circuit puts those innards on one tiny chip.

Honorable Invention: Float Glass

1960: Pacemaker

In 1956, Wilson Greatbatch grabs the wrong resistor and connects it to a device he is building to record heartbeats. When the excursion emits a pulse, he realizes the device tin be used to command the beat; in 1960 the first Pacemaker is successfully implanted in a human.

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1961: Cordless Tools

Black and Decker releases its first cordless drill, but designers can't coax more than xx watts from its NiCd batteries. Instead, they strive for efficiency, modifying gear ratios and using ameliorate materials. The revolutionary upshot puts new power in the hands of DIYers and—thanks to a NASA contract—the gloves of astronauts.

Honorable Invention: Industrial Robot, Carbon Fiber Composites

1962: Communications Satellite

Telstar is launched as the outset "agile" communications satellite—active as in amplifying and retransmitting incoming signals, rather than passively bouncing them back to Earth. Telstar makes existent a 1945 concept by science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who envisioned a global communications network based on geosynchronous satellites. Two weeks subsequently Telstar's debut, President Kennedy holds a printing briefing in Washington, D.C., that is broadcast alive across the Atlantic.

Honorable mention: Calculator Mouse, LED, Video Games

1963: Sketchpad program

Ivan Sutherland—The Father of Computer Graphics—revolutionized 3D computer modeling and simulation when he created the Sketchpad program. As the earliest iteration of a computer-aided design (CAD) program, Sketchpad pioneered the utilize of geometric constraints (fixing the length of a line or an angle between ii segments). It was also one of the first programs to use a graphical user interface, equally opposed to a text-based ane—if you lot're reading this on a computer without knowing a single line of code, you tin thank Sutherland and Sketchpad.

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1964: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Widespread use of remotely piloted aircraft begins during the Vietnam War with deployment of chiliad AQM-34 Ryan Firebees. The first model of these 29-pes-long planes was developed in just xc days in 1962. AQM-34s continue to fly more 34,000 surveillance missions. Their success leads to the eventual development of the UAVs widely used today.

Honorable invention: Music Synthesizer

1965: KEVLAR

Thanks to DuPont's Stephanie Kwolek and Herbert Blades, who in 1965 invent a high-strength polymer called KEVLAR, the body armor of over three,000 police officers has protected them from fatal attacks.

1966: High-Yield Rice

The International Rice Research Plant in the Philippines releases a semi-dwarf, high-yield Indica variety that, in conjunction with high-yield wheat, ushers in the Green Revolution. Indica rice thrives in tropical regions of Asia and Southward America, raising worldwide production more than 20 pct by 1970.

1967: Coronary Bypass Surgery

Rene Favaloro performs the first coronary featherbed surgery in 1967, taking a length of vein from a leg and grafting it onto the coronary artery. This allows blood to flow effectually the blocked department. Thank you in part to these advances, the number of deaths from heart disease declines in the U.S. past almost 50 pct.

1968: Integrated Computer Systems

In a landmark December 1968 demonstration, later known as The Female parent of all Demos, engineer Douglas Engelbart illustrates the apply of lots of contempo technologies in conjunction with each other, including: on-screen windows, hypertext, graphics, file linking, revision control, video conferencing, the computer mouse, and word processing. Both Mac and Windows user interfaces will infringe heavily from the example set here.

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1969: Arpanet

Earlier the unabridged earth is networked, in that location is the Arpanet—four computers linked in 1969. It introduces the concept of "packet switching," which simultaneously delivers messages as short units and reassembles them at their destination.

Honorable invention: Smoke Detector, Charge-Coupled Device, Automated Teller Machine

1970: Cobweb Optics

The term "fiber optic" is coined in 1956, but it isn't until 1970 that scientists at Corning produce a fiber of ultrapure drinking glass that transmits light well enough to exist used for telecommunications.

Honorable invention: Digital Music

1971: Waffle-Sole Running Shoes

Bill Bowerman, the track autobus at the Academy of Oregon, sacrifices breakfast for height performance when he pours safety into his waffle fe, forming lightweight soles for his athletes' running shoes. Iii years later, Bowerman's visitor, Nike, introduces the Waffle Trainer, which is an instant hit.

1972: Electronic Ignition

Chrysler paves the mode for the era of electronic—rather than mechanical—advances in automobiles with the electronic ignition. Information technology leads to electronic control of ignition timing and fuel metering, harbingers of more sophisticated systems to come. Today, these include electronic-control-manual shift points, antilock brakes, traction-command systems, steering, and airbag deployment.

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1973: MRI

Everyone agrees that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a brilliant invention—merely no one agrees on who invented it. The physical effect that MRIs rely on—nuclear magnetic resonance—earns diverse scientists Nobel Prizes for physics in 1944 and 1952. Many believe that Raymond Damadian establishes the automobile's medical merit in 1973, when he first uses magnetic resonance to discern healthy tissue from cancer. Withal, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for medicine goes to Peter Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for their "seminal discoveries." The topic of who is the worthiest candidate remains hotly debated.

1974: Barcode

A 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum is the first product to integrate the usage of barcode technology when it'southward scanned at a grocery store in Ohio; the codes become the manufacture standard for storing pricing data at grocery stores and expand rapidly for both consumer-facing and internal tracking applications.

1975: Global warming

Not invented, but introduced to the lexicon in its modern sense of man-made climate change. The periodical Science publishes a paper by geoscientist Wallace Broecker, "Are Nosotros on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" the first fourth dimension that the phrase is used in a scientific paper.

Broecker predicted that CO2 would drive global temperatures unprecedentedly high early on in the 21st century, and and speculated about negative consequences for agriculture and sea level. By 2018, a group of international climate scientists are anticipating a 2.7°F temperature modify past 2040, accompanied by food shortages, ever more disastrous wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs.

1976: Supercomputer

The Cray-1, the beginning commercially developed supercomputer, is installed in the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It'south the commencement supercomputer to successfully implement vector processors, a system that allows a single operation to quickly be performed on a large set of data, which is reflected in its speed of 160 MFLOPS—or 160 million floating-point operations per second. The Superlative supercomputer, which goes online at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2018, will be capable of 143.five petaflops.

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1977: Personal Computer

The Apple Two, Commodore Pet and Radio Shack's TRS-eighty are introduced in 1977—iv years before IBM, before long to become synonymous with the term "PC," unveils its personal computer.

1978: GPS

The kickoff satellite in the modern Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS) is launched. (The GPS'due south forerunner, TRANSIT, was developed in the early 1960s to guide nuclear subs.) It is not until the twelvemonth 2000, though, that President Clinton grants nonmilitary users access to an unscrambled GPS bespeak. Now, cheap, handheld GPS units can decide a person's location to within 3 yards.

Honorable invention: Genetic Engineering, In-Vitro Fertilization

1979: Sony Walkman

"This is the product that will satisfy those young people who want to heed to music all 24-hour interval." —Akio Morita, Sony Chairman, February 1979

1980: Cobalt-oxide Cathode

John Bannister Goodenough invents the cobalt-oxide cathode, a crucial component of lithium-ion batteries—the rechargeable and portable batteries that are now in every smartphone, laptop, and electric vehicle. In 2017, the 94-year-old Goodenough, apparently deciding that his last invention wasn't skillful enough announces that he's come up upwardly with a new glass-based battery with fifty-fifty better storage capability.

1981: Scanning Tunneling Microscope

By moving the needle of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) across a surface and monitoring the electric electric current that flows through it, scientists can map a surface to the level of single atoms. The STM is and so precise that it not but looks at atoms—it also tin manipulate them into structures. The microscope's development earns IBM researchers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer a Nobel Prize and helps launch the emerging era of nanotechnology.

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1982: Figurer Virus

15-year-old Rich Skrenta creates an application chosen Elk Cloner as a prank—and ends upward creating the first virus to spread outside its home network. Elk Cloner spreads via floppy deejay and attaches to the Apple tree OS 2 operating arrangement. When users boot from the disk, Elk Cloner transfers the computer's memory; whatsoever boosted disks inserted without rebooting are also infected. On every fiftieth boot, the reckoner displays text written by Skrenta:

Elk Cloner: The plan with a personality / It volition get on all your disks / It will infiltrate your fries / Yeah it'southward Cloner! / It volition stick to you like mucilage / It will modify ram besides / Transport in the Cloner!

1983: Microsoft Word

Multi-Tool Word, the forerunner to the Microsoft Word text-editing program, makes its debut every bit free copies are arranged with the November issue of PC Earth. Unlike nearly contemporary rivals, Word is designed to be used with a mouse, and features the power to disengage typing and to display bold, italic, and underlined text.

Microsoft steadily revises the program, which becomes a major success in 1990 when it's arranged with the Windows three.0 operating system.