Top 10 Innovations in Computing

[Purple]

ooo the scroll wheel is a good one - has anyone tried to use a mouse without one - absolute nightmare,

if you wanna go down the entertainment route
Force feedback devices
optical mice
Processing power double every year
Wolfenstien
Civilisation
Sim City
Arcades getting smaller to fit in a console
Pac Man (my flat mate recently wrote pac man for PS1, fantastic!)

[Kumagoro]

Internet porn must be one of the major factors in the uptake of PCs ohh yes.

[Lee H]

optical mice ..... what a great improvement.

GPU - more powerful now than some peoples CPU's !!!!!

AMD - without AMD surely the intel monopoly prices would be higher and there would be no AMD 64 for gaming and generally making P4's look like hotter slower pieces of silicon

FPS - come on....doom, HL, and now the new generation HL2 and doom 3

Nvidia - Yes they bought 3dfx and killed it, but hey it all looks worth it now with the advent of the SLI for the 6800 range

Serial ATA - without a doubt an improvement on IDE. SATA 300 is released now and that makes IDE look like the slow lane

Broadband - If 5 years ago you told me I'd be paying 29.99 for a 2Mb line I would have got you commited to the nearest mental ward. Shame about the woeful upload really though. BT pull ya fingers out and raise the upload to 512 Kb

Fingerprint recognition - Microsoft are adopting this and soon - i.e 3 weeks you'll be able to login to hotmail and MSN with your finger No more passwords, no more remebering logins for each and every site, your fingers are the key [ expect reports of people getting abducted and their fingers chopped off so people can access their accounts etc soon ]

Voice recognition - Great for disabled people and students for doing coursework

[daniel_owen_uk]

The QWERTY keyboard.
The mouse.
The floppy disk.
The CD.
The Internet.
The GPU.

How is the QWERTY keyboard a computing inovation? It was designed for mechanical typewriters, it is set out like that to stop the keys jamming.

Not only that but its crap, dvorak is much better, but I learnt qwerty

[mike_w]

How is the QWERTY keyboard a computing inovation? It was designed for mechanical typewriters, it is set out like that to stop the keys jamming.

Not only that but its crap, dvorak is much better, but I learnt qwerty

My excuse: I was tired

[daniel_owen_uk]

Broadband internet has to be up there with silicon chips and plastic circuit boards.

And no excuse mike

[Dorza]

Windows 95. Don’t laugh .

If W95 hadn't of happened computers would most probably still be in the dark ages of lifeless multimedia less screens and applications. Windows95 in my opinion anyway allowed the computer revolution to happen in the home. Without this revolution the speeds and qualities of graphics (and all the other technologies we now use) we all enjoy today would not have come about for a long time yet, we wouldn’t be where we are today atleast. I can’t imagine that the linux\unix community would have done much to push technology forward as fast as MS have. That’s my opinion on an innovation weather it be right or wrong

[PMM]

depends how far back your going ?

Surely you have to start with Valves the beginning of all things computery in the electronics era.

Followed by the dawn of the Transitors then moving on to the Microchip.
include things like Punched cards / industrial sized floppy disks throw in an early programming language

[TiG]

First off great thread....

To start with my top 10

- CD Rom drives, compare it to what you had options on at the time?, floppy disks or stupidly expensive zip disks. It was a huge leap forward for computing.
- Internet for ability to run your life on it if you so desire.
- Broadband
- HardDisk capacity (anyone remember 10mb hard disks? at the cost of £1k a go?)
- Shrinking of die size. The miniturisation process that brings us all the fast GPU's and CPU's that people are talking about
- TFT's

There are many more improvements.... but i also think we've gone backwards on a fair few things too...

- Virus's damage
- Bloatedness of OS (hello 1GB+ windows - WHY???)
- Heat disappation
- Noise

Just my take on things

TiG

[Kumagoro]

Maybe if you keep the things broad you can encompass more... i.e saying the internet then you can include broadband and other realted things.. as well as digital electronics or even broader then that, semiconductors transistors integration etc.

[Elimin8tor]

Parm you're a student in wolverhampton university and are doing assessment 2 for cp1052 right?
Hmm, well anyway im doing the same! Thanks for helping me with mine!

[Parm]

I sure am! Which student are you? Eliminator doesn't quite give it away.

Threads been really useful, thanks for all the contributions. Haven't come up with a definitive ten just yet, but will most probably be using some of the above suggestions.
I'm uncertain over how far back I wanna go.
Theoretically, if I went really far back, I could include things such as Von Neumann's concept of stored programs in 1945.
Or if I really wanted to go back in time, 3000BC, the Abacus was invented in Babylonia. Wasn't a computer itself, but a lot of computing ideas evolved from the Abacus.

I'll keep you updated and post my final top 10 when I have it.

Thanks again,
Parm

[yamangman]

The Abacus
Logarithms
The Pascaline
The Vacuum Tube
The Binary Number System
Turing's - The 'ACE'
The Transistor
Integrated Circuits
The Microprocessor
The IBM PC/Apple/MAC

And the Abacus is a computer

[Kumagoro]

If its a uni assignment I would have thought what you choose isnt that important but what reasons you give the explanation and supporting arguments.

[Elimin8tor]

Actually our report on how the top ten project was handled is what is important.

[Kumagoro]

?