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Technology Advancements
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Period: to
Beginning of Technology
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Industrial Robots
The Unimate, the first programmable industrial robot, is installed on a General Motors assembly line in New Jersey. Conceived by George C. Devol Jr. to move and fetch things, the invention gets a lukewarm reception in the United States. Japanese manufacturers love it and, after licensing the design in 1968, go on to dominate the global market for industrial robots. -
COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE
Telstar is launched as the first "active" communications satellite—active as in amplifying and retransmitting incoming signals, rather than passively bouncing them back to Earth. Telstar makes real a 1945 concept by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who envisioned a global communications network based on geosynchronous satellites. Two weeks after Telstar's debut, President Kennedy holds a press conference in Washington, D.C., that is broadcast live across the Atlantic. -
SMOKE DETECTOR
Randolph Smith and Kenneth House patent a battery-powered smoke detector for home use. Later models rely on perhaps the cheapest nuclear technology you can own: a chunk of americium-241. The element's radioactive particles generate a small electric current. If smoke enters the chamber it disrupts the current, triggering an alarm. -
The first microprocessor
When Intel brought out the first microprocessor in 1971, the Intel 4004, it started the evolution of the home computer. Up until this time most computers were in the hands of fans and scientists with few members of the public really paying attention. Measuring only 1/8th by 1/6th of an inch it was as powerful as the ENIAC built in 1946 and is, according to Intel, one of the smallest microprocessor designs to go into commercial production. -
Email
The bane of our modern lives came about as a result of work done by a man known as Ray Tomlinson in 1971. He says on his site, "I sent the first network email in 1971 using a program I wrote called SNDMSG." While we all would imagine that he can remember exactly what he wrote in that groundbreaking email and what he felt like when he sent it, he's quite open about the fact that he just did it because it seemed like a good idea at the time -
Videogame era dawns
While Tennis for Two, created by William Higinbotham, could be considered the first ever videogame, it was only in the 1970s that video games hit the big time. Pong was released in 1972 by Atari and was the result of a training exercise set by Nolan Bushnell for his protégé Al Alcorn.
Shortly after Pong entered the arcades, the hard work done by Ralph Bauer in the 1960s saw the release of the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972, the very first video game console that allowed you to play several different -
Liquid Crystal Display
The history of liquid crystals is a long and interesting one starting with their discovery in 1888 by Friedrich Reinitzer when he found them in cholesterol extracted from carrots. Carrots! However, it was James Fergason who took the research done by Reinitzer and George Heilmeier (in the 1960s) and expanded it, taking out a substantial number of patents in liquid crystal displays. Seen as the father of the liquid crystal industry, he started the International Liquid Crystal Company (ILIXCO) an -
The First Cellphone
On April 3, 1973, Motorola employee Martin Cooper stood in midtown Manhattan and placed a call to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey. -
DIGITAL ships the HSC50 controller, its first intelligent disk subsystem
The HSC50 contains local intelligence capable of managing the physical activity of the drives, optimizing subsystem throughput, detecting and correcting physical errors, and performing local functions such as diagnostic execution without host intervention. -
IBM 9345 hard disk drive
IBM's 9345 hard disk drive is introduced. Codenamed "Sawmill," it was the first hard disk drive to use magneto-resistive heads. Magneto-resistive heads gave the 9345 an advantage over its competitors, as the bits could be stored more densely. The first model of this 5 ¼-inch disk drive had two 1 GB hard disk assemblies (HDAs) and the second model had two 1.5 GB HDAs. -
CompactFlash
When CompactFlash is introduced by SanDisk, it is quickly adopted and becomes the preferred memory storage option in many consumer as well as professional electronic devices. It was highly popular in digital still and video cameras, and although its dimensions were slightly larger than some other memory card formats, its ruggedness and high capacity made it a preferred choice. Although most CompactFlash units used flash memory, some actually relied on a hard disk. -
MP3 PLAYER
Depending on who you ask, the MP3 is either the end of civilization (record companies) or the dawn of a new world (everyone else). The Korean company Saehan introduces its MPMan in 1998, long before Apple asks, "Which iPod are you?" When the Diamond Rio hits the shelves a few months later, the Recording Industry Association of America sues—providing massive publicity and a boost to digital technology. -
IBM Microdrive
The Compact Disc-ReWritable (CD-RW) is introduced. This optical disc was used for data storage and in the backing up and transferring of files to various devices. It was less robust than some contemporary storage media, and could only be re-written roughly 1,000 times. However, this factor seldom encumbered users who rarely overwrote data that often on one disc. CD-RWs that were created on CD-RW drives were often unable to be read on CD-ROM drives. DVDs overtook much of the market share from CD- -
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Modern Technology
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USB Flash drive
USB Flash drives are introduced. Sometimes referred to as jump drives or memory sticks, these drives consisted of flash memory encased in a small form factor container with a USB interface. They could be used for data storage and in the backing up and transferring of files between various devices. They were faster and had greater data capacity than earlier storage media. Also, they could not be scratched like optical discs and were resilient to magnetic erasure, unlike floppy disks. Drives for f -
IEEE 802.16
The geniuses at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers publish a wireless metropolitan area network standard that functions like Wi-Fi on steroids. An 802.16 antenna can transmit Internet access up to a 30-mile radius at speeds comparable to DSL and cable broadband. When it all shakes out, 802.16 could end up launching developing nations into the digital age by eliminating the need for wired telecommunications infrastructure. -
Dropbox
Dropbox is founded by Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston. Dropbox was designed as a cloud-based service used for convenient storage and access to files. Users could upload files via the web to Dropbox’s vast server farms, and could instantly access them on any of their devices or computers that had the Dropbox client installed. The service also included sharing functionalities which allowed access to folders by multiple users. Dropbox’s “freemium” business model allowed limited, basic file manageme
