1983
GPS/GIS: The Global Positioning System was opened for use by civilian aircraft in 1983, beginning a trend that ‘ combined with great advances in geographic information systems and mapping tools ‘ led to agency data visualized in layered maps and cars telling their drivers where to turn.
1984
CD-ROM for computers: Flattened two entire industries, data storage, and music dissemination.
Its successor, the DVD (1996), killed off the videotape.
FLASH MEMORY: Invented in 1984 at Toshiba, it found its place in small devices.
Smartphones, digital cameras, other devices (and, soon, laptops) all rely on Flash.
1985
NETWORK FILE SYSTEM: The file system that brought us to the age of network storage. No longer would your data be hostage to the computer in which it was created ‘ or to backup tape.
1987
POWERPOINT: The one you love to hate. All the knowledge in the world boiled down to easy, succinct, bullet-pointed meaninglessness.
PERL: God’s own duct tape, at least when working in Unix-based systems.
1989
WORLD WIDE WEB: Invented by Tim Berners-Lee, it would soon change the way governments, business and people operate.
1990
SLIP/PPP (Serial Line Internet Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol): We’ve forgotten about this now, but SLIP/PPP ‘ mostly PPP ‘ is what got everyone on the Internet via dial-up modems back when broadband was an obscure industry term.
1991
LINUX: A Unix knockoff that is the world’s largest hobby project for coders. A select few are among the world’s best.
HYPERTEXT MARKUP LANGUAGE: You send the instructions to the remote computer and let it figure out how to render the layout, dummy! PCI SLOTS: Rumors are unconfirmed that the national boost in technology productivity came from the thousands of admins who no longer had to fiddle with the IRQ settings each time they installed a new peripheral.
1991
GRAPHICS CO PROCESSORS: They made the fancy stuff possible by pulling graphics data away from the CPU and eventually gave rise to separate graphics cards.
992
THE BROWSER: It made the Web work for the rest of us.
1993
E-MAIL: Electronic mail goes back to the 1960s, but it really started taking off with Web use. By 1997, the volume of business e-mail surpassed that of regular mail.
ADOBE PDF: Lawyers and other control freaks love it! Also, it was perhaps the first truly effective document- sharing technology.
…(Travelling Through Time)
2007
FACEBOOK API/GOOGLE OPEN SOCIAL API: Social network programming goes mainstream.
SPECIAL JUDGE’S AWARD: Evolving technologies for programmer nutrition: foods that can be eaten with one hand, such as Doritos with salsa; plus remote teleworking at Starbucks with a double-shot latte and raspberry muffin.
BerryHub 