What’s Your Pick for Greatest Recent Tech Breakthrough?

Technology is a wonderful thing. As we have created new technical and technological marvels over the last 150 years or so, our lives have changed, and our society jas seemed to evolve alongside the technology.

Along the lines of “art imitates life,” we have a question – does technology evolve due to society, or does society evolve due to technology?

Since we work with small, mobile computers called smartphones, we marvel at the technological advances in our world. It wasn’t long ago that we had supercomputers that took up and entire room and only had about 1 megabyte of space at most. Now we have smartphones that fit in the palm of our hands and hold 30,000 to 60,000 times that amount of memory! We were just wondering about some of the great technological breakthroughs in our lives. We have a list of what we think are some of the best advances in recent memory, so we’d like to get your opinion – what is your most influential innovation among this list?

Please note that we are talking about the last 20 or so years, so the assembly line, the radio, the telephone and the television set do not qualify.

Based on this list, which is at the top of your list?

E-mail. Not even a pizza place can deliver things this fast.
MP3 players. No more bulky Walkmans!
Digital cameras. No more needing to wait for Polaroids or having to deal with those silly rolls of film that may accidentally get exposed.
E-book readers – Suddenly, our airplane carry-on bags are lighter.
GPS – because folding up a map is like a Rubik’s Cube.
The iPad – the first tablet computer, which meant we didn’t have to sling a laptop bag over our shoulders at the airport anymore.
The Internet – Suddenly the world seems like a smaller place. India is practically across the street now.