The greatest technology inventions and innovations – A personal view
An alternative view of the greatness of technology:
- Ctrl-Z. Where would we be without this? How many person decades have been saved with this?
- Proper keyboards on mobile devices. Avoided spending ages trying to type a message using he numeric key pad. Also made mobile devices much easier to use for the masses.
- Photocopiers and printers that automatically stable documents. This must have saved me years of my life trying to stable them, removing stables, fixed jammed staplers, etc.
- Inkjet printers An affordable alternatives to the old messy, noisy and poor quality dot matrix printers. Much cheaper than a laser printer also.
- GUIs, mice, icons and removal of the command prompt. Removed the need to remember large lists of intelligible commands which were often written on post-it notes stuck to terminals
- Lap top batteries that last more than 2 hours. Allowed them to become truly portable
- Mobile ‘phone and tablet batteries that last more than 3 hours. Similar to above, it allowed them to become truly portable.
- 3G, 4G, etc and general better network connectivity. Generally made mobile devices useful and usable.
- Improved networks capacity, fibre optics. Allows a large amount of data to be pushed around and also removed the horrible sound of dial-up modems.
- MS-Excel. Looking back, the amount of time that was spend on manually completing, checking, etc financial documents was enormous.
- Thin screen terminals. Possibly freed up a few square miles in desk space across the UK
I hope that you found this useful? But please feel free to comment especially if you have differing experiences and/or views?
© Paul Taylor 2018