Groundbreaking Technology

    As I said in my previous post, information technology encompasses ideas, concepts, models, and data but most importantly people. IT is the combination of connecting culture, bringing people together, assisting in knowledge distribution. There are few moments in our industry were we come upon groundbreaking technologies. While the pieces of the technology are a culmination of our greatest systems, the model that they present are what literally makes them groundbreaking. What are some of the groundbreaking technologies of our past and present?

• Portable Computer:
  Santa Monica, Ca. named GM Research. The machine which was designed and patented (US Patent No. 4,294,496) by James Murez was first delivered to The Computer Store, Santa Monica, Ca in mid 1977. It was called the Micro Star and later changed the name to The Small One.
• Cellular Phones
  The first commercial cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. Fully automatic cellular networks were first introduced in the early to mid 1980s (the 1G generation) with the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in 1981. This was followed by a boom in mobile telephone usage, particularly in Northern Europe.
• The Internet
  

  Although the basic applications and guidelines that make the Internet possible had existed for almost a decade, the network did not gain a public face until the 1990s. On August 6, 1991, CERN, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland, publicized the new World Wide Web project. The Web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

  An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW based upon HyperCard. It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released version 1.0 of Mosaic, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic/technical Internet. By 1996 usage of the word "Internet" had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its misuse as a reference to the World Wide Web.

    While there are literally a multitude of technologies we could include in this list. The three I've listed have changed the way we do business, communicate, even socialize. There are plenty of technologies within each of these categories that provide for decades of progressive innovation. Can you think of anything else that measures up?