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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."
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
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?"