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

#1 will be...

[waynegoode]

#1 will be The World Wide Web/The Internet.

#1 will be search engines

[tomhudson]

#1 will be search engines - google, yahoo, etc.

They make the web, newgroups, etc useful.

"Google it" :-)

Read the article

[Dean Edmonds]

They don't say that these innovations were created in the last 25 years, just that they "have become widely used since 1980".

The net most certainly falls into that category.

DVD's will be number one.

[loftwyr]

The DVD isn't on the list.

As HDTV made it and DVDs were invented in the past 25 years (and this is CNN, not Nature) it'll be #1.

Re:IAWTP

[jessecurry]

How can PCs be #3 when they are the requirement for #1 (if #1 is indeed teh intarweb)
PCs are not required for the internet to function. Almost any consumer good that you purchase now has a version with internet connectivity; these range from the obvious, cellular telephones, to the not so obvious, washer/dryer, oven, refrigerator, etc...
PCs just happened to be the first such item that most individuals used to connect to the internet. The internet itself is far more valuable to society than just a forum to host hypertext documents.