Over 40 Inventions that changed IT and electronics world

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Introduction into world wide inventions in the world

Last 60 years were very intense in general technology inventions. The impact of all designed materials, technologies, products was the biggest throughout human history.

I would like to go through all important inventions that created all the rest ones. This article is just a snapshot of what was happened. Separate books could be devoted to each of the inventions mentioned below.

I decided to create the overview of inventions because the knowledge about them helps to better understand why things work this way and not in another way in current IT world.

I will try to present you the beginning of our IT and electronic world with all inventions that had the biggest impact. I start from such simple things like transistor, first computers or floppy disk. Do you remember floppy disk ? Yeah, it was beautiful time when everybody was buying games that took less than 1.5 MB and was very well designed.

Let’s go into history to find out all the crazy people and inventions behind them. I decided to put all inventions in chronological order from the newest to the oldest ones.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is one of the technologies that develops very dynamically. The concept of the glasses that adds some 3d/2d effects to the existing reality (existing real world that user is in it) is relatively old and goes to 1992 when US Air Force Army tries to train their soldier flying. Probably in the current meaning of the technology the experiment was more virtual reality than augmented.

Augmented reality implemented in glasses, smart phones or tablets helps us to interact with real environment:

  • using image recognition algorithms to find something in the image
  • allows to use WiFi or 4G/5G standards to connect to external IoT devices or systems to get some parameters about environment
  • adding some maps like google maps
  • enabling calling to other people with voice recognition
Vivo has announced its first AR glasses at MWC Shanghai

The functionality of AR glasses might be use for making interactive guides from books or catalogues of engineering parts. Very interesting approach is used by Apple AR technology in inventory when user can see some details about boxes in the magazine that normally are not seen.

This kind of interactions help us as human to make faster decisions without physically touching any things. All what we need is automatically detected and displayed.

AR technology is very friendly adopted into applications in design branch. Lots of companies that manufacture fernitures or make interior design are interested augmented reality technology.

Ikea created application that you can in some simple steps verify if any new shelf, chairs, table will look good in your room or office. Now you can verify how it might look without at first ordering the furniture.

Ikea AR applications helps to test new furniture in your room

Most of Augmented Reality applications are developed in native smart phone’s systems like Android or iOS. Both the systems control the biggest part of the market. It is important to underline that this technology could develop due to maturity on top of the two systems and whole smart phones ecosystems that started decades before.

Virtual Reality

We are very close to Matrix reality that everybody can learn anything on demand. Virtual Reality is something that can speed up the learning rate in any branch in the industry but what exactly is Virtual Reality ?

Virtual Reality is fully virtual environment seen by the user virtually in VR glasses like Oculus from Facebook. Cheaper version of VR glasses consist from suitcase with smart phone that you need to put inside it.

VR world might be created programmatically. You can program VR glasses using different programming frameworks like:

Full list of available frameworks you can find here: 20 best alternatives to unity framework. It is up to you what will be more suitable to use in.

Starting from 2020 you can use virtual world created by Facebook. Horizon as Facebook says is:

“VR world where you can explore, play, and create in extraordinary ways. At Horizon, you’re not just discovering a new world, you are part of what makes it great. “

The idea is very crazy but I can imagine that in near future people will create alternative worlds that they will spend lots of time and even spend virtual money.

The only question is how to connect real world with this virtual without any problems with our brains. This is fully artificial approach in human history and we are not prepared for interactions like that. We will see.

Image recognition

They estimate that in 2021 there will be around 1 billion cameras installed across all over the world. Half of them is installed in China. The possibility to automatically find something in images grows year to year.

Speech recognition

Lot’s of interactions between different kind of devices generated needs to make voice commands between human beings and devices. Here we have the place for automatic recognition voice into text that lot’s of different companies like Google try to implement with different results into online and offline solutions.

Internet of things

Transistor

Transistor invented in 1947 vs modern transistor

Eniac first computer

First 3d printing machine

First 3d printing machine designed in MIT

Apple first computer

File source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LCM%2BL_Working_Apple_I.jpg

Mouse

Keyboard

Source http://archive.computerhistory.org – Eckert Mauchly BINAC 1949

Monitor

Monitor used with PDP-1 super computer

IBM workstations

IBM 704 mainframe at NACA in 1957 – source https://www.wikiwand.com/en/IBM_mainframe

Printer

Chester Carlson Xerography machine – source https://www.xerox.com/pl-pl/innovation/insights/chester-carlson-xerography

WWW

The NeXTcube used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server.

E-mail

Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971

Internet

tcp-ip-internet-map-of-early-1986

Notebooks

The Osborne 1. Tomislav Medak/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0 

Calculators

Source: Ezrdr/Wikimedia Commons

Floppy/CD/DVD/pendrive

Disks

Operating systems

Bluetooth

Source https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-brief-history-of-Bluetooth_fig1_333528241

USB standard

PCB electronics kits

Fiber cable

Source https://user.eng.umd.edu/~davis/optfib.html

Phones

Mobile phones

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