Greatest Ideas and Technological Advances in Recent History:

[Boundary Layer]

The timing and inspiriation for this thread is largely due to the Who will the next generations remember? thread posted by Slick6, particularly with a portion of the first post he made in there:

"This topic just makes me wonder how much further we can possibly advance. It seems as if we are advancing in such small steps now, as compared to the industrial revolution..."

I'm not trying to incite any sort of defensive response or debate from/with Slick6 over that, and he's fully entitled to hold that belief - but I don't. Observing how technology changes and how it is introduced and impacts ordinary peoples' every day lives is something that has always intrigued me, something that was possibly spurred by a statement an Uncle of mine made to me when I was fairly young (7, maybe 8 years old):

"The world has already seen more changes in your life, than it did during 30 or 40 years of my life before you were around."
​

Okay, he might have exaggerated or stretched the truth on that just slightly, but it is a memory that has stuck with me.


Anyways, the point of this thread:
What in your opinion have been some of the greatest technological innovations, life changing inventions, or ground breaking discoveries from 1950 to present -- but in particular, ones that have had a measurable impact during your own lifetime?




A few fairly obvious ones or good examples that come to mind for me are:

• development of cellular phone networks (1980's), and widespread cell phone usage on 2g and 3g networks (1990's to present)
• development of integrated circuits (replaced mechanical controls on many appliances in the 1980's) and the creation of personal computers (went from a luxury/novelty item in the 1980's to something fairly central to most of our lives today)
• debit cards! (mid 1990's - I literally never carry cash)
• high bypass turbofan engines (1970's, so not in my lifetime, but offered faster & more economical air travel)
• portable defibrillators (1960's, again not in my lifetime, but how many lives have these saved?)
• artificial CO2 sequestration (1990's or 2000's [?] to present, ongoing)

So what else? I could keep going at this for awhile longer, but I'm very interested in what other people think.

(btw - if a thread such as this already exists, please direct me to it. I did a little search and found nothing obvious)

 

[Sage]

I think you missed the most obvious one , which is the Internet.

 

[Boundary Layer]

I think you missed the most obvious one , which is the Internet.

There's a lot of obvious ones out there.

The internet was on my shortlist there for a minute, but I figured it was too obvious to even use as a worthwhile example. It absolutely deserves a spot in here though.

 

[superberkut]

Perhaps:

-radical surgery procedures (i.e.: clamshell surgery)
-not yet, but AIDS medication has the potential to be here.
-video games (which bring us all here)
-fly-by-wire (changed aircraft to more efficient designs. It made the B-2 possible)
-traction assist and power steering (but, it is a curse, too. Look at SUVs)
-the turboprop engine
-the air-powered car (still in prototype stages)
-The F-15S/MTD, Su-37 and other super-manoeuvrability fighters

More to follow.

 

[opelgt1969]

The use of "fast breaking news" just think about it. You here on _ _ _ _ (fill in the blanks) news that trouble "might" be starting up in the middle east. And BANG your local gas station raises the price of fuel buy $.20 per gallon.

 

[Loon]

All the advances in DNA research.

 

[Rykon Zero]

Nuclear Fusion.

 

[YSSMAN]

In my 21 years on Earth, I can really only think of three things that have absolutely changed the world I live in:

- Computers: I'm old enough to recall a time when the Apple II was the standard personal computer, and by golly, our elementary school having them was absolutely marvelous. Jump ahead about a year or so, we've got a computer lab full of Macintosh PCs and Gateways, and my love affair with the computer had begun...

Going back to what once was, the good ol' days seem so far away. The changes in just the past eight years have been incredible! I recall a time when we first crossed into the GHz ratings on CPUs, and I crapped my pants.

- The Internet: I don't know what else I can say about it. It was a newfangled thing when I was in elementary school, and I have fond memories of AOL 1.0... Netscape Navigator (rest in peace), WebCrawler, Hamster Dance, and the early days of internet porn. Wow. We've come so far...

- Cell Phones: I'm not even sure if people here are old enough to remember when ALL phones were tethered to the wall by wires. You were pretty lucky to have a cordless phone when I was growing up. Hell, having a cell phone? Being able to be contacted anywhere, any time? Amazing! We didn't have our first cell phone in my family until maybe 1999 (at the earliest), and since then, it has been a constant obsession. I may not understand this whole text messaging thing, or why the kids find it so important to have this model or that model of the same damn phone, but I know I'm hooked.

 

[kikie]

Carving ski!

 

[Freddie]

Mobile phones, internet, MP3, and wireless technology is what comes to mind for me.

My dad was one of the first in this country to have both internet and a mobile phone - and what a mobile phone it was. It was a huge brick of a Motorola, and it came with a docking bay that was installed in the car, so when he drove he could "dock" the phone and use it via a smaller, lighter, normal-looking phone that was a part of the docking bay. It was an impressive array of cables and hardware, the '79 Malibu's dash looking far more advanced than the dashes of the new cars of the day. My friends always went "ooh" and "aah" when they saw it - he could never get it to work though, and scrapped it along with the car.

We also had internet way back in '94 I think it was. Very early. With a state-of-the-art 28.8kbps dial-up modem. My dad's a programmer, and him being able to remote-control his computers were a big advantage for him, hence the fast modem. But when internet came along, he had that too.

And then there's wireless technology - do I even need to say that we've had wireless home-network for several years now? There's wireless internet everywere, a wireless modem is only really needed if you intend to surf the web while you're out camping in the forest.

Mp3 - A revolutionary file-format. Litteraly. Do I need to say more?

 

[MagpieRacer]

MP3 mobile phones Blu ray? HD TV and HD channels. DVD, CD, surround sound is quite recent isnt it?

 

[toyota_gt1]

Weapons. Compare a gun today from a gun a few decades ago. Look at Halo. It's only a matter of time before we will be using those on a daily bases (going deer hunting with the precious Spartan Laser) lol (sarcasm).

 

[Beerz]

Mobile phones

Computers

Internet

Super smooth 4-layer toilet paper.

Laser surgery

Brain surgery (with the guy wide awake and talking)

Using nuclear power

TV

Call of Duty 4

Microwaves

Debit/credit cards

 

[opelgt1969]

MP3 mobile phones Blu ray? HD TV and HD channels. DVD, CD, surround sound is quite recent isnt it?

As lyrics in a Jimmy Buffett song goes: I used to put four speakers in the car at the drive-in way before Quadraphonic was invented, Quad sound went big in the 60's/70's with problems. Surround sound started in the 1940's believe it or not with none other than Walt Disney's "Fantasound" in the movie Fantasia!

 

[Joey D]

High Definition entertainment, from HDTV's to Blu-Ray movies. I'm surprised how fast this has all taken off and how fast things have come down in price. I can still remember $20K plasma TV's not that long ago when they first came out.

Car technology, there are to many things to mention but I think of my mom's car from when I was a kid, an 84 Pontiac Sunbird, to any car now and it boggles the mind.

 

[TopHat]

On AIDS medication: I do believe that there is a once-a-day pill for Type 1 AIDS.

 

[Smallhorses]

1) The Microchip. (Thank you Messrs. Noyce & Kilby! 👍)
The revolution in electronics and computing sparked by the arrival of the microchip alone is probably the single greatest technological advance of all time.

2) DNA Fingerprinting. (Thank you Prof. Sir Alec Jeffries.)
As with so many great scientific discoveries, an accident with one experiment, and the realisation that the results had revealed something more useful that he could ever have hoped to be looking for in the first place, lead to the DNA fingerprint, a unique set of identifiers that each person carries in their junk DNA.

3) Ion Cyclotrons & Particle Colliders.
For just the sheer vastness of these things! The largest one at CERN is almost 30km in diameter! It has lead to the discoveries of many subatomic particles and allowed proof of many things that were purely theories before this monster came along!

 

[Azuremen]

Nuclear Fusion.

Thats the 1940s

Look at tires. Compare a circa 1950 tire to even a cheap tire of now.

Advances in interfaces for computers. From card punch outs, to keyboards, the mouse, touchpads and stylus pens, voice recognition and (while not new) a truly fast touch based interface.

Cameras. We've gone from using 35mm film and spending hours of time in a dark room adjusting a print to point, shoot, and produce a color balanced copy in under 5 minutes.

 

[Rykon Zero]

Harnessing nuclear fusion.

 

[Joey D]

Harnessing nuclear fusion.

You mean like the bombs we dropped on Japan during WWII?

 

[Sage]

You mean like the bombs we dropped on Japan during WWII?

Um, that would be fission. Fusion is an entirely different animal, and considerably more difficult.

 

[Rykon Zero]

No, I mean more like the supercollider in France where they got one reaction to put 79% of the energy produced back into itself. Yes, I mean the nuclear Fusion that bonds two atoms together releasing copious amounts of energy. Almost there.

 

[Joey D]

Um, that would be fission. Fusion is an entirely different animal, and considerably more difficult.

Wow I fail

 

[Azuremen]

Wow I fail

Its okay, I fail too

 

[Smallhorses]

In terms of technology involved in developing nuclear weapons, it was a rapid progress necessitated by the horrific incidents in WWII. However, it's extremely disputable that they could ever be called a "great" technological advance.

Joey D & Azureman's assumptions that fusion is involved come from modern nuclear weaponry, the H-bomb uses a fission reaction (see below) to achieve enough energy to trigger a fusion reaction (fusing Hydrogen nuclei together to create Helium) which releases a devastating amount of energy.
An H-bomb explosion can hardly be described as "harnessing" nuclear fusion though!

The bombs Joey D mentioned, "Little Boy" (Hiroshima) & "Fat Man" (Nagasaki) were Uranium fission & Plutonium fission bombs, respectively, detonated by the implosive forces of a conventional explosive to slam 2 halves of a critical mass of each element together, and thus creating the conditions for a nuclear explosion, albeit a fission explosion.

You didn't fail as badly as you thought guys.

 

[Azuremen]

Actually, my mistake came from somehow turning the word "fusion" into "fission" in my head. I'm very well aware of what each process entails and such.

Mine was just a simple word swap in the brain.

 

[Smallhorses]

Actually, my mistake came from somehow turning the word "fusion" into "fission" in my head. I'm very well aware of what each process entails and such.

Mine was just a simple word swap in the brain.

Sorry.
Thought I'd offer up an explanation for anyone else that was confused.

 

[Azuremen]

Sorry.
Thought I'd offer up an explanation for anyone else that was confused.

No need to worry at all as I took no offense.

To add to the list - GUI based operating systems. Most people would be hopelessly lost trying to navigate DOS or any other command line based system. Extensive use of the GUI (which parallels the increase in processing power and memory) has made computers far more accessible to the average person.

Sadly, they still have no clue what to do when something goes wrong

 

[Studentdriver]

Didn't realize there was another page.

 

[YSSMAN]

Weapons. Compare a gun today from a gun a few decades ago.

Its actually a very valid point. That show Futureweapons gets me all tingly in all of the right places. I LOVE seeing how we get to blow-up the bad guys in the not too distant future.

Of great importance in the last 50 years?

JDAM - Lets us, presumably, drop bombs in the right place
Apache - The pinnacle of attack helicopters
M1 Abrams - Yes. Yes please. Sooooo cool.

Just stuff on the top of my head. EMPs are the scary future, but I'm interested to see how we eventually (presumably) apply it.