10 Biggest
tech breakthroughs of the past 200 issues (Part 3)
Satellite navigation
Who remembers
maps, hey? These clumsy paper contraptions were the ‘route’ of 37 percent of
all divorces between 1973 and 1988. Okay, we made up that stat, but I can’t be
the only child of the 70s for whom the advent of turn-by-turn navigation
banished forever nightmares based around French road systems and the M25.
Navigation by
satellite has been available in some form since the 1960s, but for most of that
time it was principally a military tool. It became a realistic civilian product
only when the then US president Bill Clinton opened up the military’s Global
Positioning System in the late 1990s. That’s right; we have the goo old US of A
to thank for satnavs. Before long, a device that literally told you where to go
became a crucial part of every serious driver’s armoury.
Of course,
despite the way we rely on them, satnavs are no panacea. Like all digital
devices, when they are good, they are very, very good, and when they are bad
they send you down a single-track country lane in a double-decker bus. As maps
get older and road systems change, your satnav can be every bit as
geographically challenged as a harassed spouse with an A-Z. There’s a patch of
the A1 which throws my own device into paroxysms of rage as it screams at me to
stop driving through a field.
But the modern
satnav is often internet-enabled, allowing it to update on the fly. And such is
the power of modern smartphones, and the utility of satnav software, that many
people now use their mobile devices as constantly updating GPS navigators.
Indeed, android users may never need to look beyond the Google Navigation app
for getting from A to B.
Something that
seems almost banal now would have seemed like science fiction back in 1995, and
for that reason satellite navigation on smartphones and dedicated devices is a
serious technology breakthrough.
USB
We is
older than Universal Serial Bus (USB), version one of which was released in
January 1996. Offering specified data rates of 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps)
and 12 Mbps for low-and full-bandwidth respectively, the first version of USB
couldn’t support extension cables or pass-through monitors. Had we not seen the
birth of USB 1.1 in 1998, the technology would be little more than a footnote
in the history of computing.
That iteration of
the connectivity technology achieved popularity, while USB 2.0 was launched in
2000 and blasted its way to ubiquity. Promising a higher maximum bandwidth of
480Mbps. USB 2.0 was also known as ‘Hi-Speed’. It also offered the flexibility
of MiniUSB, but it’s the technology’s plug-and-play simplicity that makes it
such a winner.
Look around your
home or work computing setup, and count the number of USB connections. You may
or may not run your mouse and keyboard by USB, but we bet you have external
storage devices and USB thumb drives to extend your PC’s storage and move files
around. And while smartphone and MP3-player makers may infuriate all but
themselves by making the device end of their charge and synch cables
proprietary, the bit you plug in to the PC? That’s USB.
Desktop printers
and scanners, laptop stands with cooling fans, lights, cup holders, hubs for
more USB connectivity? ‘I hear you say. A fair point. But don’t forget that USB
is used in dongles that connect everything from Bluetooth peripherals to
wireless networks.
USB has a battle
on its hands to stay ahead of such rivals as Thunderbolt. But with USB 3.0
already on stream, who’s to say that it won’t remain the king of all connectors
for the foreseeable future?
Web search
Search has been
around since the early days of the web, but finding useful content was for a
long time a complex and unsatisfying business. Domain names and URLs were
hugely important, and you never really knew what you were getting until you
landed on a page, with often negative results.
Although Google’s
ground-breaking PageRank algorithm was the internet’s great leap forward,
search really kicked into gear in 1996. Netscape held a competition to find a
search engine for its then market-dominant web browser. The competition was so
stiff it ended up choosing five search partners, each paying $5m for pleasure
of appearing one fifth of the times that Netscape’s search page was called up.
Yet the successes of Yahoo, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite fell with the
dotcom boom and the inexorable rise of Google.
Google Search
rose to dominance around the turn of the century, with its use of inbound links
to ascertain popularity and uncluttered user interface blowing away the
competition. In time, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo have come together to provide
a viable alternative to Google, and other search engines provide more
specialist services, meaning that most web-browsing sessions start with a
search.
Search engines
are the most important newsstands for website owners. They dominate the
web-advertising industry, and in some ways rival the sites and services they
promote. Optimising sites so that they rank higher in search-engine results has
become a full-time profession. At the same time, search engines have become
much savvier at understanding what web users actually rate on the internet, and
grown increasingly sophisticated at picking out the best of the net.
Count on search
to play a crucial part in the way the web develops, as the distinction between
on-and offline continues to blur. Good, bad or indifferent, the internet as we
know it exists the way it is now only because of search.
Wireless internet
Although the origins
of Wi-Fi are much older than PC Advisor, a quick glance through our
launch issue confirms that wireless connectivity was nothing more than a pice
dream in 1995. The first commercial products to be marketed under the term
‘Wi-Fi’ appeared in 1999, and we were still banging on about the advantages of
wireless well into the naughties, as take-up proved stubbornly slow.
There are plenty
of reasons for this. A robust broadband infrastructure helps to make wireless
in the home useful and desirable, and there are plenty of places in the UK where that remains out of reach to this day. And until Microsoft and the mainstream ISPs
worked out that consumers need serious hand-holding, configuring a wireless
network in Windows was fiendishly difficult.
But once setting
up a network became a relatively simple task, Wi-Fi became ubiquitous. The PC
is liberated from the study, and sofa surfing with a laptop is possible.
Smartphones, tablets, printers, games consoles, set-top boxes and audio
systems… all can access your home network, pulling down media and pushing out
information. And each is more useful for its wireless connection to web.
Step out on to
the streets and it’s staggering how often you’ll now find yourself in range of
a wireless network. As time goes by this will only increase, with city-wide
Wi-Fi planned for many major conurbations.
Of course, Wi-Fi
has its down sides. It’s a major security risk, for a start, and its very
usefulness means that if your router fails you lose a lot. If you’re lucky
enough to live in a house with sturdy wall or multiple floors, you’ll find that
even the best connection struggles to reach every corner, and it’s easy to use
a lot of power, and even more of your data allowance, with an always-on
connection.
But walk around
your house, go on a journey, and try to imagine life without 802.11 connectivity.
Things would be a lot more constrained, and lot less fun.
