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Top 25 Innovations of the Past 25 Years
HarvardAce writes "CNN has just released a list of 24 of the top 25 innovations of the past 25 years. Most of them are things we use every day in life, such as cell phones (#2), PCs (#3), and e-mail (#5). CNN won't release the #1 innovation until Sunday, January 18 at 8pm EST (Monday, Jan 19 @ 1AM GMT), so I wanted to see if Slashdot users could come up with what they think the #1 innovation is and comment on the rest of the list."
copyright infringement is not theft. Stealing requires actual loss. Otherwise, you owe me for all the nice pink sweaters you didn't buy from me.
...The Internet did not become a commercial entity until 1992, the year that the US military moved their servers off the Internet (more or less).
But you have to admit one thing though: the real explosion of Internet use started in the fall of 1995, when Windows 95 with its built-in SLIP/PPP networking stack gave PC compatible users easy access to the Internet for the first time (Windows 3.1 could access the Internet using third-party addons, but given the nature of computer users that was still relatively rare).
No, it's not. It's an accelerometer made in an IC fab. That's not atomic-level engineering. Not even close. By IC standards, it's huge.
The "nanotechnology" label is getting out of hand. It used to apply to concepts for elaborate structures made atom by atom. Now that funding is available, it's used to refer to finely ground particles.
The shuttle, wasn't that designed and built in the 70's?
The PC is a product of the late 70's too. The Apple II, Atari and Commodore PET all were released in 78-79.
So # 3 & 20 are 70's
Air bags date to the 60's but is the footdragging by and reluctance of goverments to make the car makers use them innovation? NO
Strike number 13 too.
So it down to 22.
The internet goes back to around 1970, but TCP/IP was invented in 1983. This gave us truely scalable routing and a seperate (therefore optional) transfer layer. The internet wouldn't be able to do all the useful things it does now if it still ran NCP.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
In my opnion, it wasn't the real Internet until BITNET became part of the internet. Circa 1986. A quote:
"BITNET had people in universities all over the world; it had world-wide email; it had real-time, interactive chat, one-to-one or in "Relay" chatrooms in places like CERN; it had world-wide remote file archives you could grab files from by issuing commands; it had world-wide "Listserv" email discussion lists; you could query if people were logged on across the world; it had disconnected "answering machines"; it had email to and from all other networks.
The whole thing (BITNET plus connected networks) was the embryonic Internet. The protocol has simply migrated to IP since, that's all. If BITNET wasn't the Internet, then neither was Arpanet before it switched to IP in 1983.
- Condon, Chris; BITNET USERHELP; October, 1990."
-- Boycott Shell
Stop it!!
Al Gore never claimed to _invent_ the internet. He did claim some credit for _creating_ the internet.
This article gives the real story.
Essentially Gore provided political backing for the Internet which allowed it to become what we know today.
Among the quotes in the article:
According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by [Gore in his current role as Vice President] and in his earlier role as Senator."
The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave Ferber says that without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."
Joseph E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University, claims that Gore "was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"
To be more precise, the ARPAnet first went live in 1969, using NCP, and TCP/IP was invented in the early 1970s. In 1983, NCP support was turned off, and TCP/IP became mandatory. But it had been bopping around the lab, and to some extent the net, for years before "flag day".
And while it's probably true that NCP as it existed wasn't adequate, TCP/IP is rather kludgey too for today's use. It is there because of inertia and religious support for it (people worship it as if it were handed to Moses on Sinai). Technically speaking, it rather sucks. IPv6 is worse, however, which tells you how competent the now-commercially-motivated protocol community is.