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1984
CD-ROM for computers: Flattened two entire industries, data storage and music dissemination. Its successor, the DVD (1996), killed off the video tape. FLASH MEMORY: Invented in 1984 at Toshiba, it found its place in small devices. Smart phones, digital cameras, other devices (and, soon, laptops) all rely on Flash. -
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. -
1991
GRAPHICS COPROCESSORS: They made the fancy stuff possible by pulling graphics data away from the CPU and eventually gave rise to separate graphics cards. -
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. -
1995
WINDOWS 95: 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking made possible everything that has come along for the desktop since ' including the graphical Internet and Mac OS X. -
1996
APACHE WEB SERVER: The reliable workhorse of the Web. UNIVERSAL SERIAL BUS: Got all the device manufacturers to settle on one device bus. Cats, meet herder. MP3 AUDIO FORMAT: A file format that pretty much leveled an entire industry ' and movies are next. FLASH: Scripting your Web page like a movie, or anything else, with almost zero-client footprint. -
1998
GOOGLE: We'd call it the portal to the Web, except portals aren't this easy to use. The search bar is rapidly becoming the sippy cup of culture ' with more than partial thanks to Wikipedia, Google's query shortstop. EXTENSIBLE MARKUP LANGUAGE: Data that tells us what our data is. But this data is in brackets, so we know what it means, more or less -
2004
WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE: The beginning of the Semantic Web. ADOBE FLEX: Flash development, open-sourced in 2007, for Rich Internet Applications. -
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
