100 technologies that changed the world

3G

We may curse slow-to-download phones more than a caravan on a bendy A road, but history will show that third-generation networks did for mobile broadband what ADSL did for its fixed-line equivalent. According to Cisco, the current 150% year-on-year mobile data traffic growth mirrors that of fixed-line internet traffic a decade ago, but on a much vaster scale: mobile data traffic in 2010 was three times the size of the entire internet in 2000. Without 3G, remote working would be greatly diminished; just ask the people who live outside Britain’s major towns.

ADSL

Deployment over existing phone lines made Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line the starting point for the broadband revolution in Britain. Sadly, for many years it’s also been a sticking point, as anyone living or working too far from the telephone exchange still suffers low bandwidth, despite much of the industry moving to “up to” 24Mbits/sec ADSL2+. At least prices have dropped – BT charged £40 a month for a 512Kbits/sec connection (plus £150 installation) when it launched in 2000.

ADWORDS

Invented by a company subsequently acquired by Yahoo, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is an example of Google transforming someone else’s great idea into a $28-billion-a-year cash cow. Traditional advertising, online or off, involves parting with cash upfront and hoping that sales from the ad campaign outweigh its cost. PPC allows firms to create ads that appear in the search results for specific keyword phrases, a system Google calls AdWords. Advertisers pay only when their ad is clicked on by a punter who visits their site. This means anyone can compete in the global marketplace by carefully choosing the right keywords and optimising their site and ads. Of course, they have to convert visitors to customers, or they could end up pouring money into the infamous AdWords Black Hole.

APP STORE

It may seem inconceivable that the original iPhone didn’t offer third-party apps, but it’s true

In 2008, Apple launched the iPhone App Store, to partner the iPhone 3G (it may seem inconceivable that the original iPhone didn’t offer third-party apps, but it’s true). It was the first major portal for smartphone software, and it focused on making it as simple as possible to find, buy and download apps. The store was hugely popular, with iPhone and iPod touch users downloading apps in vast numbers. Android and Windows Phone 7 have since copied the App Store model and seen similar success. It’s no exaggeration to say that the App Store has changed the way people use smartphones.

Can the miracle be replicated elsewhere? Apple launched the Mac App Store earlier this year, offering direct downloads of full-sized desktop games and applications for OS X, and Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 8 will include its own app store. It remains to be seen, however, whether the one-stop impulse-buy model will shift full-price desktop applications as effectively as it has 99p iPhone games.

ASCII

Established in 1963, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange was the first standard system for encoding alphanumeric characters. ASCII made it easy to move data between systems, but, being American, it didn’t originally support accented letters, nor any currency symbols other than the dollar. International computer manufacturers had to make do with fudges until the more advanced Unicode system was established in 1991.

BARCODES

US engineers Joe Woodland and Bernard Silver devised the barcode in 1949 as a way of automating the checkout process at grocery stores – and the system is still going strong today. It’s estimated that Universal Product Code (UPC) symbols are scanned more than five billion times a day. The system now enables self-checkout and even live price comparison via smartphones. Quite an achievement for a collection of boring black and white lines.

BASIC

Developed as a teaching language in the mid-1960s, BASIC ignited the careers of a whole generation of coders, through its implementations for the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum. In fact, it’s one of the few programming languages to have been taught in British schools, most having neglected coding in favour of spreadsheets and word processing. Providing a version of BASIC for the Altair computer in 1974 gave Micro-Soft [sic] its big break, and Visual Basic 3 put Windows programming into the hands of the masses.

BIOMETRICS

One of the few technologies that’s made the transition from sci-fi to reality, biometrics are now used to log in to laptops, scan tickets and even buy school dinners. With iris recognition planned for the next generation of passports, and research being conducted into behavioural scans to measure typing rhythm and voice inflection, this very personal technology will only become more pervasive in the years to come.

BLADE SERVERS

It may sound like something from the space age, but a blade server’s principal function is rather mundane: to save space. Blade servers are modular systems that house many server “blades” – essentially, much thinner equivalents of the more prevalent units housed in standard 19in-wide rackservers, known as 1U, 2U and so on. Blade servers were developed in the 1990s in response to the need of datacenters to increase performance and availability without having to expand the physical space in which servers were stored.

BLOGS

When does a fad become a force to be reckoned with? Maybe it was when The Huffington Post received $5 million of investment in 2006, Perez Hilton was given a TV show, or when Gizmodo’s leaked iPhone provoked the ire of the world’s biggest technology company. Blogs used to be personal, but now they’re global powerhouses that challenge traditional media as well as governments – and they’re here to stay.

CAD

Not so long ago, technical drawing was a painstaking job for a professional, and if you wanted to see how an idea would work in the real world you had to build a prototype. With computer-aided design, any type of plan can be assembled and tweaked in a jiffy. With physics simulation, engineers can even slam their ideas into virtual walls to see how they survive – safely, and without wasting a penny.

CCTV

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell wrote about a terrifying future
in which Big Brother kept watch over people’s every move. Some would say that nightmare has arrived, with millions of spy cams littering our roadsides and city centres. CCTV isn’t necessarily malign: coupled with the power of the computer it enables all sorts of services, from cheap security for small businesses, through tracking dangerous criminals using numberplate recognition, to helping drivers avoid the worst traffic snarl-ups. We may not have learned to love Big Brother, but at least he can be helpful.

CGI

The first computer-generated images to hit screens in 1969 were of a dancing triangle on Sesame Street. From such inauspicious beginnings, CGI has taken over the film industry – although it’s taken some time, with James Cameron famously waiting more than a decade for the technology to catch up with his imagination to create Avatar. While some actors, such as Harrison Ford, have complained that computer effects are overused, for every badly done green-screen scene, there’s the raptors in Jurassic Park, the T-1000 in Terminator 2 and everything Pixar’s ever made.

CHARGE-COUPLED DEVICE

The CCD – a small photoactive piece of silicon at the back of your digital camera – has indisputably changed the world. It’s destroyed the photographic film industry in little over a decade, provided news reports with near-instant photos from almost any breaking story, eliminated the cost of photo paper and processing, and – perhaps most importantly – allowed people to share the fruits of their camera work instantly, by using the screen on the back of a camera or by publishing online.

CLOUD COMPUTING

The ability to access computing resources from anywhere, and from any kind of device, frees users and applications from the desktop, enabling us to carry our applications and data around with us. Even in pubs and restaurants we can stay in contact with our social networks and work projects, where previous generations had to make do with talking to their colleagues.

DATABASES

The original database could be said to have originated in the libraries of ancient Greece, the first society to gather knowledge methodically in one easily accessible place. These days, databases are digital and pervasive, and drive a huge range of applications. They can take the form of simple repositories of data about individuals – from medical records to the credit-card details of millions – or provide the building blocks and content for the world’s most popular websites. Without the database, where would we be? Back in the Stone Age, probably.

DESKTOP PUBLISHING

The advent of desktop publishing software rendered the art of typesetting (and phototypesetting), entirely redundant. The first breakthrough DTP package, Aldus PageMaker, made its debut in 1985 on the Apple Macintosh, with a Windows version following two years later. Wysiwyg allowed users to preview the printed page accurately before going to press, and made it easy to combine text and images in complex page layouts.

DIFFIE-HELLMAN KEY EXCHANGE

There are two types of encryption: private-key encryption, where data is encrypted and decrypted with the same key; and public-key encryption, where the two operations use different keys. Private-key encryption is fast, but how do you share a key with someone you’ve never met before? Answer: they choose it at random, encrypt it with your public key and then only you can decrypt it. This is the basis of virtually all encryption on the internet. It’s what makes e-commerce secure, and it’s why we owe Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman a debt of more than mere gratitude.

DIGITAL PROJECTORS

The phenomenon of the projected image has inspired mankind for millennia – the principles of the camera obscura are documented as far back as 470BC – but the move from film projection to digital projection was an important milestone. Where projectors were once huge, noisy devices, the arrival of LCD and DLP-based projectors allowed compact, affordable devices to proliferate, supplanting the old overhead projectors in schools and businesses and making home projectors more attractive than the huge, expensive CRT projectors formerly adopted by home-cinema enthusiasts. Now they’re even built into smartphones and cameras.

EBAY

Along with Amazon, eBay was one of the pioneers of online shopping. It now boasts sales of $60 billion a year, more from professional retailers rather than clutter-clearers. During its heyday, eBay drove people online with tales of outrageous auctions – virginity and dead fairies all made perfect marketing. Issues with fraud and false feedback failed to stop the company’s progress.

ELECTRONIC INK

It might be the Etch A Sketch of display technologies, but despite being slow, monochrome and restricted to low resolutions, electronic ink offers two huge advantages over the LCD panels used by tablets and laptops. Its pigment-based technology doesn’t require continuous electrical power, so real-world battery life is measured in weeks. Its true genius, however, is that eBook readers using this technology are as readable as books – even in direct sunlight. Just not in the bath, okay?

ELECTRONIC CALCULATOR

Once upon a time, kids were drilled in their times tables and complex mathematics required a slide rule and an agile mind. The electronic calculator changed all that: suddenly anybody could perform advanced calculations instantly. It has liberated engineers and scientists from mathematical drudge work and freed them to focus on new applications. Some might say it’s also given the man in the street one more excuse to think less.

EMAIL

Like it or not, email changed the world. Not only has it revolutionised the workplace, it was one of the main forces that led to the creation of the internet. Originally invented in the early 1960s for people logged into a single system, it wasn’t until 1970 that Ray Tomlinson sent the first email across a network using the “@” symbol to specify an address. Thanks, Ray.

FACEBOOK

Many people claim to hate Facebook, but almost everyone you know is on it. With more than 600 million users, the ultimate social network has pushed – for good and bad – the boundaries of online privacy, and changed how we waste time at work, communicate with friends and find and share interesting bits of information. One in six referrals to news sites now comes from Mark Zuckerberg’s out-of-control college project.

FLASH

(ADOBE) Flash is lambasted by defensive Apple fans – and Steve Jobs – as a buggy, resource-intensive piece of software, but millions of websites can’t be wrong. Introduced in 1996 as Macromedia Flash and acquired by Adobe in 2005, it helped the fledgling web break away from the narrow confines of HTML and enabled developers to incorporate audio, video and interactive elements into their pages. Its eventual replacement by HTML5 seems probable, but there’s no denying Flash’s historical importance.

FLOPPY DISK

The easy, portable and – crucially – random access storage offered by floppy disks was a step forward for personal computing, which previously had been reliant on punch cards and tape. The first floppy was created by Alan Shugart at IBM in 1971, and was an 8in disk offering a whopping 79.7KB of storage. By 1981, floppies had shrunk to 3.5in and were encased in rigid plastic. A version from Sony offered 400KB, which eventually expanded to the better-known 1.44MB. Apple opted not to include a drive on its first iMac in 1998 and Sony was the last major floppy manufacturer, holding out until 2010. The disks live on in the “Save” icon, notably in Office 2010.

GOOGLE SEARCH

Google’s search engine has become so critical to overall web traffic that the merest tweak of its infamous algorithm can genuinely ruin businesses. Google gives its highest weighting to incoming links, making its search results more reliable than those of its competitors when it hit the market at the end of the last century. Although recently replaced as the web’s most visited domain by Facebook, Google remains the company everyone wishes they had bought shares in.

GPS

The Global Positioning System was created by the US military in the early 1990s. Most people probably think of it as the satellite system that allows their satnavs to work, but GPS is everywhere these days: it automatically opens train doors at stations*; it tags our photos so we’ll remember where we took them; it even keeps servers’ clocks in sync. Its main use, however, is in preventing marital arguments on long car journeys.

(*Except at London Victoria, where the roof prevents GPS reception, so many trains sit for ages before the doors will open.)

HAWK-EYE

British invention Hawk-Eye is one of the few technological innovations that can claim to have truly revolutionised sport – particularly cricket, where it helps decide crucial wickets, and tennis, where its trajectory tracking can decide a vital point in the Wimbledon final. It’s proved itself to be fast, accurate and reliable – take note, FIFA.

HOME PRINTERS

When today’s printer can have its own Android tablet and app store, it seems odd that the core thermal inkjet technology has been here since the 1980s. The Canon Bubble Jet and others killed off the dot-matrix printer and brought home printing to the masses, along with decades of complaining about ink prices.

IBM 5150

PC PC Pro has trumpeted the headline “build a PC” more than once in its lifetime, but there was a time when you had to do precisely that. Grab a pair of goggles, dig out the soldering iron and get to work assembling a pack of components sent through the post. On 12 August 1981, the day IBM announced the 5150 in New York’s Waldorf Astoria ballroom, the idea of a personal computer seemed an oxymoron. And then came the complete package of Microsoft operating system, bundled apps and a system unit built like a beige tank. Aside from the 4.77MHz processor and 16KB of available memory, it’s a blueprint stunningly close to what we still use today. The IBM 5150 didn’t change the personal computing landscape; it created it.

IMAC

Announced in 1998, the first iMac, the iMac G3, set the trend for the all-in-one PCs we see today. A marked departure from the uniform beige of the traditional PC, the iMac’s translucent plastic figure – created by Apple’s now senior vice-president of industrial design, Jonathan Ive CBE – wasn’t the only shock; it was the first Apple computer to do away with the floppy drive, replacing it with a CD-ROM drive, and also the first Mac to adopt the USB standard.

IN-CAR COMPUTING

Computing has transformed cars, although many of the changes are largely invisible to the driver. Press the brake pedal, for instance, and computerised ABS sensors detect whether the wheel’s in danger of locking up, and automatically pump the brakes to prevent skidding. The “pre-crash systems” in modern cars use lasers or radar to avoid collisions with oncoming vehicles, and even adjust the driver’s seat to avoid whiplash. The systems in tomorrow’s cars will automatically keep a safe distance between surrounding vehicles and virtually drive themselves (web ID: 366961).

INSTANT MESSAGING

Although it’s been around since the 1960s, IM really took off with the arrival of ICQ and AOL’s Instant Messenger in the mid-1990s, letting teens chat online unbeknown to their parents, enabling co-workers in other offices to communicate without picking up the phone and – perhaps most importantly – allowing silent gossip about others in the same office. As fast as email but less trouble, IM is cheap and easy communication for all, and BlackBerry’s own messaging client remains one of its top selling points.

INTERNET PORN

It’s easy to dismiss porn as one of the “evils” of the internet, but it was the driving force behind e-commerce, streaming video and paid-for content. Porn sites pioneered these technologies long before other media and conventional websites. If online porn hadn’t flourished, it would have been a huge blow to mainstream web development.

IPAD

Apple has a knack of creating game-changing products, and the iPad is a work of genius – not only for its gorgeous design, intuitive user interface and capacity to invite ridicule when used as an expensive notepad, but because it finally proved the form factor could work. Its time as the only star in the sky may already be over, but boy did it burn brightly.

IR REMOTE CONTROLS

The remote control is responsible for how TV is broadcast today. To hold the attention of channel-hopping viewers, ad breaks were shifted to the middle of programmes, credit rolls were split-screened and programmes grew shorter and more manic. Without the remote we wouldn’t have PVRs and today’s mammoth channel lists, but we’d all be a little more active.

JOYSTICK

First developed for aeroplanes, no-one knows whether the joystick
has a smutty etymology or whether the term refers to the American pilot and (possible) inventor, James Henry Joyce and his “Joyce-stick”. Either way, the Gameport was one of the first add-on cards for the original IBM PC, and the joystick became an essential accessory, turning mechanical movement into a digital signal. It transformed early PC and console gaming into something that rivalled the arcade.

JPEG

There are any number of more efficient compression methods, but JPEG is the most common image file format on the internet today. That’s because of its core strength: it’s lossy, to a selectable degree, and capable of producing small file sizes without making images unrecognisable. Like MP3 for music, it’s in the mainstream and doesn’t look as if it’s going anywhere soon.

LAPTOPS

Introducing the now-ubiquitous folding format, 1982’s GRiD Compass 1101 weighed 4.5kg and lacked a battery, but crammed in a 6in 320 x 240 electro-luminescent display, an 8MHz Intel CPU, 240KB of magnetic bubble memory, and used its own GRiD OS. At $8,150 it was a specialist purchase, and was used by US Special Forces and Space Shuttle crews. Rumour has it they left one up there, and the Compass II can be seen controlling the sentry guns in Aliens.

LASER

Once described as a “solution looking for a problem”, it’s now said you’re never less than ten feet away from a laser. While most of these are found in obvious applications such as optical media and printing, lasers are also key to fibre-optic transmission. They’re also used for many forms of manufacturing, particularly integrated circuits. The circuit densities in a modern processor can be produced only by using laser lithography.

LCD

It isn’t so long ago that our computer and television screens were bulbous affairs, taking up lots of room and belching out heat and eye-reddening charged ions. Thankfully, nice, flat liquid crystal displays now adorn our desktops and the walls of our living rooms. We’ve recovered lots of space, and rub our eyes far less often, but perhaps it’s the reduction in the office air-conditioning bill that’s been the most dramatic change.

LITHIUM ION BATTERY

Dwindling batteries get a lot of flak but, without the crucial combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte, it’s likely that today’s laptops, smartphones and MP3 players wouldn’t be the slim, portable devices that we’re so used to. Made from a concoction of carbon and lithium, these high-energy devices can store a mighty 150 hours of power in a 1kg battery. For comparison, a typical car battery stores only 25 hours of electricity per kilogram.

It’s this efficiency that’s led to the lithium ion battery being installed in a huge range of devices: Nissan uses them in its hybrid cars, they’re installed in biometric sensors, and the US Department of Defense has conducted research into their use in ships, aircraft starter engines and even pulsed energy weapons. Perhaps there the lithium ion battery’s penchant for occasionally bursting into flames could be put to good use – but already these versatile power packs fuel
all of our smartphones and laptops, proving they’re one of the key innovations when it comes to portable technology.

MASSIVELY PARALLEL PROCESSING

Modern computer processors are complex beasts, designed to meet the varying demands of desktop software. Sometimes, however, what’s needed isn’t sophistication but brute force. Massively parallel processing uses hundreds or thousands of very simple processors – sometimes, the same type used in graphics cards – to tear through huge sets of data in seconds. It’s proved a game-changer in fields ranging from meteorology to finance, and even military intelligence.

MECHANICAL SWITCHES

Think how many times you’ve pressed the keys on your computer’s keyboard in your lifetime and you might start to appreciate the impact the humble switch has had on technology over the years. Whether it’s the rattle of an expensive typewriter’s keyboard, the flat membranes of Sir Clive Sinclair’s ZX80, or the click of the first mouse, it’s our ability to manufacture small, affordable mechanical switches that makes it all possible.

MODEM

The modem – which stands for modulator-demodulator – was first created for news, teletext and air-defence purposes. The devices initially made their way into the world of computing via IBM in 1943, but they didn’t become relevant to mainstream consumers until telephone-based modems began to offer dial-up internet access, bringing the World Wide Web to our PCs and that lovely series of beeps and screeches modems made when dialing.

MOUSE

The easiest and most precise ways for a user to indicate a point on the screen is by pushing a little box around on the desk

The first mouse, invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1967, was a simple wooden cuboid on wheels. Today’s laser-based devices are festooned with buttons and scrollwheels, but are based on the same principle – that one of the easiest and most precise ways for a user to indicate a point on the screen is by pushing a little box around on the desk.

MP3 COMPRESSION

In the early 1990s, only a madman would have considered sharing music online. After all, an audio file copied from a CD weighs in at 30MB or more, which would take several hours to receive over a modem. The first MP3 encoding software was released in 1994, and by the end of the decade it had enabled generation-defining innovations such as Napster and the personal audio player – throwing the recording industry into a decade of bluster and denial.

NETBOOKS

For a short time, the netbook was the hottest form factor in town. With its roots in the basic, cheap PC pioneered by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) charity, the netbook came of age with the Asus Eee PC in 2007 and graduated to Windows machines that combined reasonable computing power with solid battery life, all for less than £200. Netbook sales may have peaked, but they’ve dragged down the price of conventional laptops permanently.

NEWS AGGREGATORS

When media organisations want to blame the web for destroying their bottom line, they need look no further than news aggregators. The largest automated aggregator is Google News, which launched in beta in 2002, and – in keeping with Google’s extended beta phases – officially arrived in 2006. Since its arrival, it’s been the subject of countless complaints from newspapers claiming that Google is stealing their content, while the web giant counters that all it does is hand them traffic. Either way, it’s changed the way people find news – and how journalists write headlines, which must now appeal to aggregator algorithms as well as human readers.

NOKIA 9000 COMMUNICATOR

Smartphones didn’t, as Steve Jobs might want us to believe, start with the iPhone. They began way back in the mid-1990s with the hulking Nokia 9000 Communicator. This was the very first handset to put fax, email and organiser capabilities in your (very large) pocket, and it spawned generations of copycat devices. Unfortunately, Nokia never fully capitalised on this early lead, and now it’s RIM, Apple and Android ruling the roost.

ONLINE DATING

Where the search for love once took place in the lonely hearts column of the local newspaper, millions now flock to the online dating sites scattered across the web. Gone are the occasionally cryptic abbreviations of the lonely hearts ads (GSOH, WLTM, ALAWP), replaced by a variety of matchmaking algorithms. Some sites match users with highly detailed questionnaires; others with jaunty character references written by friends. When it comes to matters of the heart, however, there’s only one guaranteed winner: online dating is a billion-dollar business in the US alone.

ONLINE DISTRIBUTION

When Valve released Steam in 2002, it was designed to automatically push out game patches. Although it took several years to persuade publishers, it’s since grown into a vital anti-piracy tool and pulls in over half of the PC games industry’s revenue. That success paved the way for the Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Store, and for the TV and movie industries to finally get involved.

ONLINE MAPPING

Online maps mean we need never get lost again – and no more struggling to refold unwieldy paper maps. The big change came with the arrival of Google Maps in 2005, with near-global coverage in a simple, searchable format. Open APIs led to mashups on more than a million websites, letting us follow flu outbreaks, track aeroplanes and find the nearest pub, while Street View made house-hunting easy – not only do we know how to get there, but we can find out if it’s worth going in the first place.

OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE

Most people associate open-source software with Linux, but this particular computing concept goes way beyond Ubuntu and its ilk. Open-source ideals underpin popular software such as Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice and WordPress, as well as all the content produced by the Wikimedia Foundation. The concept goes beyond computing: OpenCola’s freely available recipe is said to compare favourably to Coca-Cola, and open-source beer has been brewed by Danish students.

OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION

We take our ability to read text for granted, but getting a machine to do likewise is trickier. OCR has more applications than you might think. We wouldn’t have a mechanised postal service without it; the US and British post offices were among the first to use it on an industrial scale. And banks would take even longer to process cheques. Unthinkable.

PACKET SWITCHING

Packet-switching technology lies at the core of networking. In order to exchange digital information, it’s broken up into packets and sent over a network with tags saying where each packet came from and a tag saying where it must go. The idea was developed in the early 1960s separately by Paul Baran in the US and Donald Davies in the UK. However, it was the American ARPA project and Arpanet that made the idea really work.

PALMPILOT

A landmark on the route from Filofax to smartphone, the PalmPilot brought electronic communications to the pocket, with the Professional version boasting TCP/IP, remote email access and apps. During its development in 1997, designer Jeff Hawkins avoided feature creep by carrying a wooden block around as a note-taker. If new ideas didn’t fit elegantly on his board, they didn’t go into the PalmPilot.

PAYPAL

Founded in 1998 and bought by eBay for $1.5 billion only four years later, PayPal is the popular face of paying for goods online. Where transferring funds around the globe was once a troublesome pursuit, PayPal has made the process simple, with 20 localised sites providing straightforward conversion between 24 currencies across 190 markets, as well as offering (questionable) buyer protection for disputes. PayPal’s most recent claim to fame was freezing the $600,000 of donations in WikiLeaks’ account, claiming the whistle-blowing organisation had breached its terms of service.

PEER-TO-PEER NETWORKING

Having spread the load from expensive, centralised servers to thousands of peers scattered around the network, peer-to-peer (P2P) should be an indisputable computing hero. Yet, famously deployed by Napster to illicitly share music, and subsequently by Skype to not-so-illicitly make voicecalls over the internet, P2P has earned an undeserved level of notoriety. Today, the four biggest mobile networks in the UK all restrict P2P to some degree.

PERFORMANCE CAPTURE

Motion capture has been making your keeper dive naturally in FIFA for years, and facial capture saw a sinister Tom Hanks terrify kids in The Polar Express. But it’s Gollum’s schizophrenic monologue in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers that dropped jaws by combining body- and facial-motion capture to stunning effect. The technology is now a staple of the entertainment industry.

PERSONAL VIDEO RECORDERS

TiVo started it all, but it was the launch in 2001 of the Sky+ service that introduced a new verb into Britain’s lexicon. Dancing a jig on the grave of the VCR, the futuristic ability to record, pause and even rewind live TV was bettered only by the ingenious Series Link feature and, later, the ability to set recordings from your phone. The market is now packed with rivals, not least – thanks to software such as Windows Media Center – potentially any PC or laptop.

PLUG AND PLAY

Installing hardware before the advent of plug and play was a depressing process of manually configuring system settings, I/O ports and DIP switches – and even then it left much to chance. Plug and play is far from perfect – as the frequency of those yellow exclamation mark symbols in Windows Device Manager confirms – but these days many devices don’t even need driver discs, let alone a decision on which IRQ to use.

PODCASTS

Podcasts took advantage of the success of the iPod to bring together the best of radio with the best of the web, making it cheap and easy for producers to create and share shows, and letting users listen to what they want, when they wanted. The name was coined in 2004 by Guardian journalist Ben Hammersley, who also suggested “audioblogging” and “GuerillaMedia” as options. Episodes of one of the most popular shows – from comedian Ricky Gervais – have been downloaded more than 260 million times.

PONG

The concept may have come from a tennis game on the Magnavox Odyssey, but Atari’s Pong can claim to have popularised both electronic arcades and home video-gaming. The angled rebounds and accelerating ball were ingenious additions, but the rallies were accidentally kept to an arcade-perfect length: a defective circuit meant the paddles didn’t quite reach the top of the screen. That glitch was left in as a “feature”, and the rest is history.

POSTSCRIPT

It may be a humble description language for laser printers at heart, but PostScript has a more interesting history than you might have thought. It was the technology that sustained software juggernaut Adobe through its early years, and Adobe’s licence fees for its PostScript Type 1 Font technology lie behind the adoption of the TrueType font system in Windows PCs. Intriguingly, it was Apple, in partnership with Microsoft, that successfully challenged Adobe’s monopoly on laser printer font technology. Apple championing open standards; who’d have thought it?

POWERPOINT

A force for good or evil? The battle still rages, but we think it’s mainly the fault of those social outcasts who love to throw in lots of stats, bullet points and graphs, and then tediously walk you through every… single… one… of… them. Let’s not forget what came before: PowerPoint has rescued us from physical slides and overhead projectors, not to mention the dreaded photo slideshow. So, overall, thanks Bill.

QUADRATURE AMPLIFICATION MODULATION

You may think you’ve never heard of quadrature amplification modulation (QAM), but you’ve almost certainly heard it. QAM is a method of sending digital data over an analogue channel. It combines frequency (pitch) changes with amplitude (loudness) and phase changes. It’s the noise you hear from a fax machine, an old modem or a game loading on a Spectrum. QAM is also the basis of signalling in DSL and cable modems.

RADIO-FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION

RFID allows a computer system to identify compatible “tags” on nearby objects using radio waves. It lets you perform transactions such as validating a travel ticket by simply walking past a sensor – much faster and more convenient than physically validating a ticket. RFID can also raise the alarm when a teenager tries to smuggle a bottle of Tesco Value vodka out of the shop under his jumper.

ROUTER

Most people with access to the internet at home will have come across the concept of the router – the small plastic box that acts as their gateway to the wonders of the internet. But routers aren’t simply home devices: without the original router – the Interface Message Processor (IMP) – Arpanet couldn’t have existed, and without Arpanet we wouldn’t have the internet.

SHANNON’S “A MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION”

In 1948, a mathematician called Claude Shannon published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in two parts in the Bell System Technical Journal. It set out the theory behind how best to encode information so that it could be sent to someone over a noisy channel. Shannon’s paper set a framework for all digital communication to determine how errors are detected and corrected.

SOFTWARE SYNTHESIS

The arrival of the microprocessor in the music studio began a revolution. Early sampling workstations, such as the Fairlight CMI, used Motorola microprocessors to record and play back digitally sampled sounds, albeit at huge expense. The power of the modern CPU democratised that process, allowing any PC to become a self-contained music studio. With the help of packages such as Apple’s GarageBand or Steinberg’s Cubase, hard disks have replaced reels of magnetic tape, while software synthesisers, or soft-synths, can transform the most humble laptop into a do-it-all digital audio workstation.

SOLAR CHARGERS

Charging a laptop via the solar cells on a backpack might not have changed our world, but it’s a different story in developing nations, where electricity is a luxury. Whether letting NGO volunteers remain in the field or helping locals make a living, portable solar chargers power lighting, mobile phones, laptops, wireless internet and even hearing aids.

SOLID-STATE STORAGE

It gave us memory cards, helping to popularise digital cameras and camcorders. It’s in USB thumb drives (now up to a quite ludicrous 256GB and counting). It allowed MP3 players to shrink to the size of a matchbox yet hold an entire music collection, all while being bounced around on a treadmill. It killed off the floppy disk. It made data theft easier. It didn’t really ReadyBoost our Windows PCs, but your computer can boot directly from it. It graced the first low-cost, high-excitement netbooks; it’s used in 3G dongles; and we wouldn’t have today’s smartphones and tablets without it. If there’s one single technology that’s been central to the boom in gadgets over the past decade it’s flash storage – and we haven’t even mentioned the potential that exists in SSDs…

SPAM

With their potential rewards ranging from Porsches to prison sentences, spammers remain the most opportunistic parasites on the internet. At one point spam accounted for more than 95% of all email sent; an incredible 7.7 trillion junk email messages originated from Brazil alone in 2009, according to Cisco. Bill Gates optimistically promised to eliminate spam within two years in 2004. He left the computing industry well before spam did.

SPEECH RECOGNITION

Unless we’re swearing at them, we don’t generally like talking to our computers; but where would we be without computers that take down our details – and get them horribly, horribly wrong? Speech recognition, which was pioneered in the early 1950s, is a worthy technology with many applications. It allows the physically disabled to commit text to the page and control Windows PCs; it lets you dial your mum’s number while you’re driving without having to take your hands off the wheel; and with smartphones relying on fiddly onscreen keyboards, speech-recognition apps may just prevent you from throwing your handset out of the window in frustration.

SPEECH SYNTHESIS

We’re all familiar with the robotic charm of the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell, Stephen Hawking’s synthesised tones, and “at the next junction, turn left”, but not many people know that speech synthesis technology has its roots long before modern-day computing. It goes back as far as the 18th century, when Hungarian researcher Wolfgang von Kempelen constructed a machine with a rubber mouth, bellows for lungs and a reed to simulate the vocal chords in a bid to understand how human speech worked.

SPELLCHECK

Wat wod wee du withoot spel chek? The word-watching software has been saving computer users from clumsy typing and misspellings since the 1970s. It’s a standard feature in productivity suites, and made the jump to browsers with Firefox 2 – so there’s no excuse for mistake-filled status updates. Some accuse the technology of dumbing down language skills, but most of us would rather see the red, squiggly warnings as we type than look stupid over a typo.

STEALTH TECHNOLOGY

Stealth technology indisputably changed the world in May this year, when US forces relied on an arsenal of computerised surveillance and covert equipment to find and assassinate Osama bin Laden. The al-Qaeda leader was reportedly identified by a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aircraft system flying over his Abbottabad compound. And the US Navy Seals arrived at the compound undetected in specially adapted Black Hawk helicopters that were designed to deflect radar and dampen noise.

SYSTRAN

Originally set up to translate Russian for the US Air Force during the Cold War, SYSTRAN’s language translation technology was later reborn on desktop PCs. AltaVista used it for Babel Fish, which helped a generation to fail GCSE French. Apple put it in OS X Tiger’s Translation widget. Even Google Translate initially used it before developing its own alternative to dominate the online market – expect your Vogon poetry to eventually come via a Google fish.

TCP/IP

TCP/IP was designed to be as simple as possible. That may sound like a limitation, but in practice it enables almost any device to communicate with almost any other. That’s given this bundle of protocols incredible longevity: the IPv4 system we use today was established in 1981.

TCP/IP also provides a decentralised routing model, so there’s no need for a central server. That makes it very difficult for supervillains to shut down the entire internet.

TOUCHSCREENS

Given that today’s touch interfaces come as naturally to most people as breathing, it seems remarkable that it took so long for touchscreen tablets to make the breakthrough into the mainstream. The first touchscreen was developed at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, Worcestershire, by EA Johnson. His 1965 paper described a “novel input/output device for computer systems [which] has wires, sensitive to the touch of a finger, on the face of a cathode-ray tube on which information can be written by the computer”.

Forty-odd years later, we’re just getting to grips with the technology while clinging to our keyboards. Which is why researchers at the Kajimoto Lab in Japan are working on next-generation screens that zap your fingertip with an electrical pulse every time it touches the glass to mimic the feeling of a proper keyboard.

TRANSISTOR

If there’s one device without which our lives would be completely different, it’s the transistor. It was never going to be possible to miniaturise the valves and relays of the 1940s to a point where a device that fits in your pocket could contain a radio transmitter, two radio receivers, a couple of cameras and a computer to control it – a smartphone. The transistor made this – and much, much else besides – possible.

TV MODULATOR

This humble component was a vital ingredient in the games console and home computer boom of the 1970s and 1980s. Eschewing a dedicated monitor helped keep the stream of emerging computer systems affordable to most households. And hooking up to the family TV also brought video games right into the living room, turning what could have been a nerdy niche market into a universal phenomenon.

UNDERSEA CABLING

For all the advances made in satellite communications, the internet still relies on good old physical cable to carry the majority of its traffic. It all started in the mid-19th century with the laying of telegraph cable across the English Channel; the first transatlantic cable was laid a few years later, in 1858.

Today, we have fibre-optic cables stretching around the world, capable of sending data at terabytes per second. In fact, the only place not linked up via undersea cables is Antarctica.

UNDO

Along with its seductive cousins copy and paste, these simple shortcut keys have saved countless time and billions of blushes

If Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, then Microsoft (and every other software manufacturer) stood on the shoulders of IBM: it was two of IBM’s employees who first voiced the idea of an “undo” command, way back in 1976, and the concept was wedded to Ctrl-Z by Xerox. Along with its seductive cousins copy and paste, these simple shortcut keys have saved countless time and billions of blushes since. If only real life could be reversed at the touch of a button.

USB

In the mid-1990s, a dizzying array of cables sprouted from the average PC. With different computer manufacturers using a variety of non-standard ports and cables, often to serve the same purpose, seven major technology companies – known as the USB Working Group – started to search for a better solution in 1994. Continuing from Wynn Smith’s aborted 1990 Intel project, codenamed Hunacre, in which he developed an upstream/downstream communication interface, the USB 1 standard finally surfaced in 1996. It’s now universal, both in name and nature.

UNIX

In 1980, the BBC produced a documentary on modern art called The Shock of the New. The phrase could equally be applied to Unix in terms of its effect and its influence. Unix took ideas from another system (Multics) and rewrote the operating system rulebook – and every operating system since owes a debt to the Bell Labs team that developed it. The idea of giving away the source code to universities and other developers was also the seed of open-source software.

VACUUM TUBE

Before transistors, current-switching in electrical circuits was achieved using vacuum tubes. These bulky components looked like light bulbs, and had a similar tendency to blow unexpectedly. However, in sufficient quantities they provided enough power to get the job done, as proved by the 1946 ENIAC military computer, which used more than 17,400 tubes. Vacuum tubes are still used in a few niche roles, notably hi-fi and instrument amplifiers, but consumer devices have universally moved to cheaper and more reliable solid-state transistors.

VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK

We’re all familiar with the concept of teleworking, but without the advent of the little-heralded virtual private network (VPN) it wouldn’t be possible on the scale it is today. VPNs enable workers to hook into office networks directly and securely, eliminating the need for expensive leased lines – and saving thousands of workers around the world from having to put up with their colleagues’ bad habits.

VIRTUALISATION

The idea of creating a “virtual machine” inside a real one may sound a bit pointless, but for businesses it’s sparked a revolution. It’s now possible to run five, ten or 50 servers on a single computer, slashing power demands and hardware complexity. You can also configure a virtual machine to revert to a known state each time it starts up – the Groundhog Day approach to systems management.

VIRUSES

Self-replicating software is one of those ideas that’s so simple it’s brilliant. Or perhaps that should be so simple it’s terrible, as viruses and other online nasties have been responsible for untold frustration, wasted time and lost data since the Creeper virus first started infecting DEC PDP-10 systems in 1971. Modern malware prefers to keep a low profile, so if you don’t keep an eye on your bank statements you might never know it’s there.

VOIP

The closest most people think they’ve come to Voice over Internet Protocol is through Skype, but anyone with a phone on a desk in
their office may be conducting their conversations over VoIP without even knowing it. VoIP has changed the world in numerous ways: it’s allowed expats to talk to their families and friends at home without worrying about the phone bill, it’s spooked the mobile networks into banning or choking VoIP-based apps, and it’s tempted eBay and recently Microsoft to spend billions on a company – Skype – that runs at a considerable loss. It’s probably the least profitable game-changer the planet has ever seen.

WI-FI

Remember when connecting to the internet meant sitting next to the phone socket? With the introduction of the first commercial Wi-Fi standard, 802.11, it became possible to use your laptop literally feet away from the router, as long as there was no intervening wall. Wi-Fi finally came of age with the introduction of 802.11n and the widespread creation of hotspots in cafés, hotels and airports. Updating Facebook has never been more convenient.

WIKIPEDIA

It sounds like a recipe for disaster – an online encyclopedia collated by the masses – but Wikipedia works on the principle that for every ill-informed or vindictive editor, there’s a whole army of experts dedicated to accuracy and objectivity. Nature magazine claimed that Wikipedia achieved accuracy similar to that of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, while having more than 30 times as many articles. How did we know that? We looked it up on Wikipedia.

WIMP

There are two things that make the “Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device” interface incredible. First, it was virtually all created in one system – the Xerox Alto – which everyone else copied. Second, the interface was much more advanced than anything else that had gone before. At a time when most computer input was done by making a hole in a piece of card, here was an interface that’s recognisable and usable today.

WINCHESTER DISK DRIVE

IBM shipped the first disk drive in 1953, and in 1973 it shipped its first Winchester drives. The design was developed at IBM’s Winchester laboratories in Hampshire and contained a number of novel ideas. A disk drive consists of spinning platters on which data is read and written by heads. Before Winchester, these heads were heavy assemblies that were held above the disk and would destroy it if they touched it. With Winchester drives, the head assembly is much lighter and literally flies above the disk. As the head flies closer to the disk it’s possible to pack in data more densely and more reliably. In addition, the head lands on the disk when the disk is powered down, meaning the surface has to be lubricated. This combination of heads flying close to the disk and landing on its surface meant that devices were sealed in a box – as all disk drives are now.

WINDOWS

No matter what you think of Microsoft, its OS is an accomplishment; to most people, it is computing.
Forget the monopoly, security and stability complaints – for a moment, if you can – and stick to the positives: Windows holds 89% of the operating system market, according to Net Applications. XP is a decade old and still works (we’ll pretend Vista didn’t happen), and is used by a massive 53% of computers users. No matter what you think of Microsoft, its OS is an accomplishment; to most people, it is computing.

WORLD WIDE WEB

Here’s a fun pub game: try to remember how you accomplished basic tasks before Tim Berners-Lee kick-started the web two decades ago. Everything was more difficult: keeping track of friends, paying bills, booking holidays, settling arguments, looking up addresses, procuring porn. While the web has created challenges as well – just ask any newspaper owner – it’s now hard to imagine what it would be like not to have everything at our fingertips.

YOUTUBE

More video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the three major US TV networks have created in 60 years, according to the Google-owned video site. Consider the costs of hosting and serving up the 13 million hours of video uploaded to the site in 2010 alone – none of which is deleted unless the user or a lawyer representing a copyright owner decides otherwise – and it’s easy to see why Google is still wondering how it can make a profit from the world’s biggest video library.