Technology: Past, Present, and Future

If we compare the technology between the past 50 years, & now, we will see how different it is. In the last 5 decades the technology had grown a lot, making what we thought impossible in the past became highly possible now. How about if we compare present technology & future technology 50 years from now? The easiest way to predict that is to think about something that looks impossible at the moment, but don't predict things that are too unrealistic. To help you out, here are a timeline about the technology from the past 50 years until now.

Year	Events
1960	Snowmobiles were created.
1962	William Armistead and S. Donald Stookey of Corning Glass Works invent light-sensitive (photochromic) glass.
1963	Ivan Sutherland develops Sketchpad, one of the first computer-aided design programs.
1964	IBM helps to pioneer e-commerce with an airline ticket reservation system called SABRE.
1965	Frank Pantridge develops the portable defibrillator for treating cardiac arrest patients.
1966	Stephanie Kwolek patents a super-strong plastic called Kevlar.
1967	Japanese company Noritake invents the vacuum fluorescent display (VFD).
1968	Alfred Y. Cho and John R. Arthur, Jr invent a precise way of making single crystals called molecular beam epitaxy (MBE).
1969	World's first solar power station opened in France. Long before computers become portable, Alan Kay imagines building an electronic book, which he nicknames the Dynabook. Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invent the CCD (charge-coupled device): the light-sensitive chip used in digital cameras, webcams, and other modern optical equipment. Douglas Engelbart develops the computer mouse. James Russell invents compact discs.
1971	Electronic ink is pioneered by Nick Sheridon at Xerox PARC. Ted Hoff builds the first single-chip computer or microprocessor.
1973	Martin Cooper develops the first handheld cellphone (mobile phone). Robert Metcalfe figures out a simple way of linking computers together that he names Ethernet. Most computers hooked up to the Internet now use it.
1974	First grocery-store purchase of an item coded with a barcode.
1975	Pico Electronics develops X-10 home automation system. Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman invent public-key cryptography.
1976	Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs launch the Apple I: one of the world's first personal home computers.
1980	Japanese electrical pioneer Akio Morita develops the Sony Walkman, the first truly portable player for recorded music.
1981	Stung by Apple's success, IBM releases its own affordable personal computer (PC). The Space Shuttle makes its maiden voyage. Patricia Bath develops laser eye surgery for removing cataracts.
1982	Alexei Ekimov and Louis E. Brus (independently) discover quantum dots.
1983	Compact discs (CDs) are launched as a new way to store music by the Sony and Philips corporations.
1987	Larry Hornbeck, working at Texas Instruments, develops DLP® projection—now used in many projection TV systems.
1989	Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web.
1990	German watchmaking company Junghans introduces the MEGA 1, believed to be the world's first radio-controlled wristwatch.
1991	Linus Torvalds creates the first version of Linux, a collaboratively written computer operating system.
1994	American-born mathematician John Daugman perfects the mathematics that make iris scanning systems possible. Israeli computer scientists Alon Cohen and Lior Haramaty invent VoIP for sending telephone calls over the Internet.
1995	Broadcast.com becomes one of the world's first online radio stations. Pierre Omidyar launches the eBay auction website.
1996	WRAL-HD broadcasts the first high-definition television (HDTV) signal in the United States.
1997	Electronics companies agree to make Wi-Fi a worldwide standard for wireless Internet.
2001	Apple revolutionizes music listening by unveiling its iPod MP3 music player. Richard Palmer develops energy-absorbing D3O plastic. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia is founded by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. Bram Cohen develops BitTorrent file-sharing.
2002	iRobot Corporation releases the first version of its Roomba® vacuum cleaning robot.
2005	A pioneering low-cost laptop for developing countries called OLPC is announced by MIT computing pioneer Nicholas Negroponte.
2007	Amazon.com launches its Kindle electronic book (e-book) reader. Apple introduces a touchscreen cellphone called the iPhone.
2010	Apple releases its touchscreen tablet computer, the iPad. 3D TV starts to become more widely available.
2013	Elon Musk announces "hyperloop"—a giant, pneumatic tube transport system.
2015	Supercomputers (the world's fastest computers) are now a mere 30 times less powerful than human brains.
2016	Three nanotechnologists win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for building miniature machines out of molecules.

So, what kind of new technology do you think will be created in the future?

Posted by : Ivan Hosea
NRP : 216116524