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."

Comments

No, it's not "nanotech"

[Animats]

"The device that causes an airbag to inflate in a crash is a nanotech device," said David Kirkpatrick, senior editor at Fortune Magazine.

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.

Some errors IMO

[Graemee]

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.

Re:#1 will be...

[dspeyer]

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.