The technical changes that have changed the world

There is no official inventor of the phone, but already in 1959 the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke foresaw the invention of "a small and compact transceiver so that everyone would have a scope with it." Even in the classic series of science fiction (Star Trek) one could see personal devices for communication. Racing with the fiction, the real world got busy to catch up and in 1973 introduced the first mobile phone. Today, the smartphone is a tool by which many of us never separate, and we can no longer imagine our life without it.

Pong was not the first electronic game, but was the first to demonstrate how they could become popular video games. Without the Atari Pong in 2600, there would be the video game industry. The simple, two-dimensional ping-pong on the screen was the pioneer of a revolution that would soon brought before Space Invaders and Pac-Man, then Lara Croft and Call of Duty.

PageRank is a method of hierarchical ordering of Web pages based on how many other pages link to them. If this sounds too technical, considering that PageRank was developed in 1998 by two brilliant Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. PageRank remains the core of the search engine Google, one of the main access routes to the Internet

The technical advances of recent decades have given great impetus to robotics, high-growth industry. The idea of ​​humanoid robots, however, is quite old, and already in 1939 the power company Westinghouse built Elektro, a two-meter tall robot that responded to voice commands, telling jokes, smoked cigarettes and inflated balloons. Elektro caused a sensation and cemented in the collective image of the humanoid robot.

Prior to iPods and MP3 players was the Sony Walkman, the portable audio-cassette that has changed the way we listen to music. Suddenly, the music was around us, and we did not have longer to stay still in one place to hear it. The Walkman traced the path that led to the iPod, and the idea of ​​entertainment on the go has now penetrated everywhere, from Angy Birds to the Nintendo DS.

The system VCR (Video Cassette Recording) made ​​for TV movie and what the Walkman did for music has transformed the world of entertainment. The videotapes recordable marked the turning point in the relationship between viewer and broadcaster. From the seventies users have started to be able to control what they watch and when, a trend reinforced by the recent invention of digital video recorders such as TiVo.

Much imitated but never improved, the first iPad was launched by Apple in April of 2010 in the wake of the success of the iPhone, to immediately become one of those things that change the rules of the game. With more than 200 million units sold worldwide, and with half a million native apps, the iPad's popularity seems to know no decline.

This innocuous little box has changed the way we work, we play, we relax. The Wi-Fi and mobile data freed us from having to sit at the table and opened the way for a new generation of gadgets and communication tools.

Thanks to the invention of the digital camera we are all good photographers. Without the limit given by the film, the digital offers the opportunity to take as many photos as we want and then choose the one that seems the best. In addition, with the variety of filters and effects included in the camera, we are now just one click away from the portrait or landscape perfect.